Hewlett-Packard Co has come out with an object-oriented overlay for Oracle Systems Corp’s Oracle7 relational database, saying that the product, HP Odapter, enables object-oriented applications and their data to be stored in an Oracle7 database. Expected to be ready in September, Odapter will run on Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstations, IBM Corp RS/6000s and Windows-based personal computers as well as Hewlett-Packard’s own HP 9000 Unix machines. Odapter is designed to enable Oracle7 to store objects created by object-oriented applications so that software developers can create purely object-based applications on top of existing Oracle7 systems – and Odapter objects incorporate the data as well as its accompanying business processes and rules; its object model is claimed to be compatible and tightly integrated with C++ and Smalltalk application-development environments. It is $6,000 for a two-user, concurrent-access licence permitting the user to install an unlimited number of clients.
