Mountain View, California-based Objectivity Inc believes the application development environment vendors are currently doing more to promote the use of object-oriented technologies than the object database houses that started the object orientation ball rolling in the first place. It compares the object database market with the struggle data warehousing underwent to become a commercially accepted technology and hopes that its business, like data warehousing, can finish its uphill climb and start gathering momentum on the downhill side. The problem, it believes, is that data processing managers have barely had time to swallow the relational pill before being asked to try another kind of medicine. The key to success, Objectivity believes, is being able to show how object structures are far more suited to large databases that require complex, many-to-many relationships, than relational tables. Although there are instances of very large relational structures – Red Brick Systems Inc”s 300Gb AT&T Corp site for instance – Objectivity claims that 90% of relational databases hold less than 1Gb data and that 99% store less than 10Gb. Training, education and comparative studies are therefore imperative for the object industry as a whole, the company argues. Other issues that need to be solved include standardisation on a single object language for database interrogation. Currently the Object Data Management Group’s ODL/OQL language is squaring up with the object extensions proposed in SQL 3, a situation Objectivity hopes can be reconciled within 12 months. Although frameworks have recently attracted a negative reputation for being cumbersome lock-ins, Objectivity believes they are a useful paradigm for object technologies, enabling applications to be deployed and to interoperate cleanly, and for clearing up any loose ends without the need for a separate package in addition to the application to do this work. Therefore, it believes packaged object offerings, with a database, application development environment plus a choice of the increasingly popular visual front-end tools are essential for winning management information system hearts and minds. Objectivity, which has recently tapped Red Brick’s William Evans as its new vice-president of marketing and created a new professional services organisation to further some of these goals, will unveil version 4.0 of its object database in late summer. It will feature user data replication, high-availability, and fully distributed processing, the company claims. Users can go into the Objectivity database through C, C++, Smalltalk or SQL and out onto 17 different machine types. Objectivity has raised $18m since 1988 and claims it’s on the cusp of profitability, with 200 development and 100,000 run-time licences in the field. More capital would be needed to and do any new development, but it believes it could raise new cash without too much dilution.
