A New Renaissance for ODBMSs?

By Rick Cattell, Robert Greene, Leon Guzenda, Luis Ramos, Carl Rosenberger, Roberto Zicari(Editor)

August 3, 2009: This is a follow up of the panel discussion, which took place at the ICOODB 09 conference on July 2, 2009 in Zurich. Roberto V. Zicari, Editor of ODBMS:ORG asked each of the panelists to give written reply to some of the questions that were asked at the panel, and he also added here a few new questions:
Q1. Could you estimate the current market for ODBMS, how is it changing (size, geography, licenses, dollars, etc.), and whether/where the market is growing?
Q2. Who is using an ODBMS? For what business domains and applications are ODBMSs being practically used? Could you please give examples of typical applications that use an ODBMS? Also please indicate whether/where ODBMS applications domains are changing.
Q3. What are the most innovative features (if any) added/ or improved to/for ODBMS in the last years? And why are they useful?
Q4. Scalability, Performance, Support of OO languages, Impedance Mismatch: can you please describe briefly how in your opinion ODBMSs differ (compete) with respect to other databases, such as relational, and O-R mappers? Q5. Standards: Why have standardization activities for ODBMSs not progressed??
Q6. Open source: Some Open Source databases that have been successful in their respective domains, have been recently sold. For example MySQL sold to SUN and then to Oracle, and db4objects sold to Versant. Both Oracle and Versant do have proprietary products. Is Open Source a viable business model option for a database?
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