Denver, Colorado-based Unidata Inc and O2 Technology SA of Versailles, France, will jointly develop an object-relational database product based on the companies’ existing technologies. The resulting client-server product will provide a scalable framework for new application development and support the continued use of legacy applications via both schema and data migration and mapping, they promise. The product will be developed over the next 18 months, and will be component-based and designed as an Object Service Architecture implemented around an Object Management Group-compliant Object Request Broker. It will use Unidata’s current Release 3.X nested – non-first normal form – relational storage manager, particularly its transaction and recovery facilities, which combines both in-place relations and a fully navigational data access model. Several modules from the O2 System, including the object database engine, the Object Data Management Group standards-compliant query language interpreter and object-relational interoperability tools, will be incorporated into the final product. Unidata says that by using O2’s object technology it will be able to provide a full object model on top of its existing nested architecture, providing the benefits of object-oriented d evelopment and navigational data access while preserving the set manipulation and high-performance transaction throughput characteristic of the nested relational model.
