News from the OMG Object Database Technology Users and Vendors

I have received some information from Mrs. Charlotte W. Wales (The MITRE Corporation) related to the OMG Object Database Technology Users and Vendors Roundtable, which took place on 11 December 2007 at the OMG meeting in Burlingame, CA. I have listed it below as I have received it.

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News from OMG Object Database Technology Users and Vendors Roundtable, 11 December 2007

All the hard work that went into preparation of the Next Generation Object Database Standardization White Paper, augmented by the publicity received here at the ODBMS.ORG Portal (in the Forum), resulted in a successful Users and Vendors Users and Vendors Roundtable at the OMG meeting last December in Burlingame, CA. The meeting attendance of 14 was a healthy mixture of users and vendors representing Objectivity, Versant, Gemstone, db4Objects, and Fujitsu (used to market Jasmine) Tibco, Progeny, Boeing, TUMunich, Kangwon Univ (Korea), PJI, Syracuse Research, and MITRE.

After a welcome and introductions conducted by Char Wales (MITRE), Mike Card (Syracuse Research), calling in from his sickbed in New York, introduced the Next Generation Object Database Standardization effort, providing important historical and technical background including his role in the ODMG.

Prof K. Subieta (PJIT) then gave a presentation on his Stack Based Approach to Object Databases. Anat Ghafni (db4Objects) presented and summarized the high points of the sometimes lively discussions that appeared in the ODBMS Forum in response to the White Paper. These presentations laid an excellent groundwork for discussions during the ensuing Roundtable, moderated by Mike Card and Char Wales, which fulfilled the Roundtable’s “Objectives” – a completely open Forum, with nothing off limits.

The conclusion of the Roundtable was an agreement to work on a Roadmap for achieving the goal of an adopted Next Generation Object Database Standard with vendor implementations by 2009. Facilitated by teleconferences – the plan is to have an initial version of this Roadmap ready in time to present at the ICOODB 2008 ICOODB 2008 conference in Berlin and at the OMG Technical Committee meeting in Washington, DC, both scheduled for the same week in March 2008. If things proceed well, it is hoped that an RFP will be ready for issuance by June 2008, and – with luck – initial
submissions ready for review by the end of this year.

For the benefit of those who have not been part of this “from the beginning”, a recap of a few of the significant events within OMG leading to the Roundtable last December is in order:

-Sep 03: 1st Object Database Working Group meeting; idea of improving existing ODMG3.0 standard introduced.

-Nov 03, Apr ’04: “Socialization” of this idea within OMG.

-May 04: Morgan-Kauffman grants OMG the right “to publish, revise, disseminate and use original and revised versions of the Standard as an OMG specification (the “Specification”)” subject to limitations detailed in letter to OMG.

-Sep 05: ODBMS.ORG portal launched.

-Dec 06: Decision to expand scope to Object Database Technology (including modeling and mappings between object and relational).

-Feb 06: Object Database Technology Request for Information (RFI) Issued.

-Jun 06: Report summarizing 11 RFI responses identified three ways forward.

-Sep 07: Next-Generation Object Database Standardization White Paper issued.

Charlotte W. Wales