San Mateo, California-based Poet Software Corp will ship Poet 3.0, its long promised ODMG-93 Object Database Management Group-compliant object-oriented database next month (CI No 2,384). Unix versions will have to wait until the end of the quarter, but in the meantime the database is up under Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT and Novell Inc’s NetWare. Poet is a C++ object database management system, with support for encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. It boasts object querying, sorting, indexing, transactions, class versioning, container classes, variable string and binary large object types. It includes support for Object Linking & Embedding and Open Database Connectivity, schema versioning, check in/check out, loading part of a database onto a notebook computer, on-line back-up and a workbench that includes class and object browsers, according to the company. Poet includes the Object Database Management Group-type classes in its C++ interface with Poet OQL, Object Query Language, which it claims enables queries of complex objects and navigation with syntax similar to that of Structured Query Language, SQL. Poet is still working on the SmallTalk subset of ODMG-93, saying that it is due by the end of the year. Next month, Poet will reveal third party tools including computer-aided software engineering, graphical user interface and report-writing tools. Poet 3.0 is up on Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc, Silicon Graphics Inc, OS/2 and Macintosh workstations later in the quarter. No prices are available yet.
