Why have object oriented databases not been successful (yet)? [closed]

Answer 1

Well, it's strange isn't it? There is such a push towards domain driven design as the zenith of object orientated analysis and design, and there are enterprise patterns out there to leverage ORM systems to persist our objects. It just makes total sense to me that if your application DESIGN is object orientated and domain focussed at heart, that an OODB will greatly benefit your application.

Aside from the issues around maturity and uptake, from a philosophical perspective an OODB would appear beneficial or an OO application. not having to maintain that mapping layer for starters;)

But look, if you aren't doing domain drive design and use objects as data objects and like your stored procs, then you're not really going to get it;)

Answer 2

The main reason is SQL. It is very useful to be able to use the data from a database in other contexts outside of the application, and often with object databases the data is stored in a format that can't easily be queried. With a relational database the data can become part of a data warehouse, for instance, or just queried by sys admins etc.

Answer 3

RDBMs are (built on a strong theoretical foundation, have been in the market for a much longer time, can model data more faithfully than OODBs in many cases, can be used by more DBAs than OODBs). That's one reason in the form of a relational tuple.

Answer 4

That, and o/r-mappers. Through them, the difference to true OO-DBs becomes way smaller, while the aforementioned benefits stay valid.

Answer 5

I think that there are two philosophical reasons.

First, people traditionally tend to separate persistence from real functionality. Once you strip away an object's "life" away from it and keep it primarily for persistence, it becomes a record, and then there is a tendency to treat it as a "lifeless" data object.

Following on that, when people think of a large collection of very similar things, they start thinking of them as tables rather than objects.

I think with O/R the distinction is starting to disappear. For example, I use hibernate to dump really complex class hierarchies into a MySQL database. However, I don't write performance-critical stuff for my project so I'm sure it's not done efficiently.

Answer 6

The reason for the slow adoption of OODB's are based largely on a few key factors that make the relational SQL databases more popular and/or more appropriate. While pure object-oriented databases are now in a state where they overcome much of the drawbacks of the relational model, there are some key pieces missing.

For one they tend to lack support for central database management, though this is rapidly being rectified in various products.

A second reason is that very few systems implement a standard query language and instead relies on the programming language or specialized query languages to retrieve and manipulate the data in store. This is a show stopper for many if they have to learn a new query language on top of the totally different mindset of a programmer used to NoSQL based solutions. On top of that, most SQL based / Relational databases now have some support for Object Oriented Design, plus we have wrappers like ORM that many use to "bypass" the problems of relational databases not being readily available in the programming language of choice.

But these problems exist mostly in corporate environments. As embedded databases in small devices, as web site storage and in fields like aerospace they have become very popular and in many cases totally replaced the need for regular relational databases.

Who knows what the future holds?