NEWS RELEASE 5/15/2008
Java Object Persistence: State of the Union PART II Published
ODBMS.ORG, a vendor-independent non-profit group of high-profile software experts
lead by Prof. Roberto Zicari, today announced a new,
second sequel to its popular panel discussion
Java Object Persistence: State of the Union, adding responses from the ODBMS.ORG
experts Jose Blakeley
(Microsoft), Rick Cattell
(Sun Microsystems), William
Cook (University of Texas at Austin),
Robert Greene (Versant), and
Alan Santos (Progress).
The panel addressed the ever open issue of the impedance mismatch, a problem which
has existed ever since computers were used to persistently store data - in file
systems or database management systems -, and where no fully satisfactory solutions
have been found as of yet.
"Today, I see two types of impedance mismatch problems," says
Jose Blakeley, a Partner Architect in the SQL Server Division at Microsoft.
"(1) the application's impedance mismatch problem, and (2) the impedance mismatch
in data services." Alan
Santos from data integration specialist Progress Software takes a different
view: "Historically impedance mismatch has referred to the issues encountered when
mapping data from a relational store into an object oriented data model. For some
people, in some very practical ways, impedance mismatch is not an issue and has
been solved with improvements in O/R mapping libraries and performance improvements
in the runtime environments, as well as hardware itself."
Rick Cattell, formerly
Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems who has been instrumental in the foundation
of J2EE, SQL Access/ODBC and JDBC, sees three solutions to overcome the mismatch:
"The top three options for Java are JDBC, O/R mapping, and an ODBMS." But panelists
differed when asked about their views on whether object-relational mappers, relational
databases and object databases were a suitable solution to the "object persistence"
problem.
The panel also attempted to define new areas of research and development in object
persistence. Microsoft's Blakeley: "I would like to see technologies like the EDM,
EntitySQL, and EF be absorbed natively by relational database systems." UT Austin's
William Cook, a father
of Apple Script, Safe and Native Queries agreed
and wished that "major database vendors implement OQL (or some variant, like HQL)
as a native database interface to their databases."
The complete panel transcript is available for free
download.
ODBMS.ORG Panel Expanded
In the meantime ODBMS.ORG has named the following individuals to new panel experts:
Experts continue to contribute papers to the portal, such as the recent publication
of the Moira Norrie,
Michael Grossniklaus,
et. al. (ETH Zürich) paper
Semantic Data Management for db4o, a proceeding from the ICOODB 2008 conference
in Berlin, fostering ODBMS.ORG's position to be the Internet's most up to date resource
portal on object database technology.
About ODBMS.ORG
ODBMS.ORG (www.odbms.org) is a vendor-independent, not-for-profit educational program
on object database technology and the integration between object-oriented programming
and databases. Designed by Prof. Roberto Zicari of Frankfurt University, the program's
goal is to promote and further the use of object databases - by offering free resources
for students, faculty and researchers at universities and research centers, as well
as for JAVA and .NET developers in the commercial and the open source world. Content
is provided by a panel of internationally recognized experts, who share research
articles and teaching materials with the community via the organization's Web portal.
Contact ODBMS.ORG at editor@odbms.org.