Next-Generation Object Database Standardization

By Michael Card

September 27, 2007 Abstract: Following the dissolution of the Object Data Management Group (ODMG) in 2001, standardization efforts for object databases languished. What has emerged since is a fractured marketplace where each vendor has developed a unique set of programming interfaces and features and no truly portable way of interacting with an object database exists. In 2005, the OMG’s Object Database Technology Working Group was formed as the successor to the ODMG, and our first effort has been to create the object equivalent of the relational calculus. We believe that the foundation for this “object calculus” can be found in the research done by Prof. Kazimierz Subieta and his students at the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology. We have prepared this white paper to serve as an introduction to Prof. Subieta’s “stack-based architecture” (SBA) and to define the OMG version of it. The definitions and semantics of SBA will, we believe, allow the construction of a complete and correct object model that supports a powerful object query language as well as a complete and correct set of equivalent native programming language bindings.
DOWNLOAD (PDF)