Towards the Maturity of Object-Relational Database Technology: Promises and Reality

Object-relational technology provides a significant increase in scalability and flexibility over the traditional relational databases. The additional object-relational features are particularly satisfying for advanced database applications that relational database systems have experienced difficulties. The key factor to the success of object-relational database systems is their performance. This paper aims to review the promises of Object-Relational database systems, examine the reality, and how their promises may be fulfilled through unification with the relational technology. To investigate the performance implications of using object-relational relative to relational technology, the query-oriented BUCKY benchmark has been previously applied to an early object-relational database system, i.e., Illustra 97. This paper presents the results obtained from implementing and running the BUCKY benchmark on Oracle 10g. The results acquired from the work described in this paper are compared with the results obtained in BUCKY benchmark. This study throws light on the functionality of object-relational databases, where object-relational technology has made improvements but some limitations are identified as well. In general, the performance of relational supersedes that of object-relational database system.