Has anyone used an object database with a large amount of data?

Question

Object databases like MongoDB and db4o are getting lots of publicity lately. Everyone that plays with them seems to love it. I\'m guessing that they are dealing with about

Answer 1

Perhaps worth a mention.

The European Space Agency's Planck mission is running on the Versant Object Database. http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=46951

It is a satelite with 74 onboard sensors launched last year which is mapping the infrarred spectrum of the universe and storing the information in a map segment model. It has been getting a ton of hype these days because of it's producing some of the coolest images ever seen of the universe.

Anyway, it has generated 25T of information stored in Versant and replicated across 3 continents. When the mission is complete next year, it will be a total of 50T

Probably also worth noting, object databases tend to be a lot smaller to hold the same information. It is because they are truly normalized, no data duplication for joins, no empty wasted column space and few indexes rather than 100's of them. You can find public information about testing ESA did to consider storage in multi-column relational database format -vs- using a proper object model and storing in the Versant object database. THey found they could save 75% disk space by using Versant.

Here is the implementation: http://www.planck.fr/Piodoc/PIOlib_Overview_V1.0.pdf

Here they talk about 3T -vs- 12T found in the testing http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2008/12/10/cosmic-data/

Also ... there are benchmarks which show Versant orders of magnitude faster on the analysis side of the mission.

CHeers, -Robert