Unisys Corp’s six-years-in-the-making Osmos object-relational database management system is here. Designed with the telecommunications market, especially transaction-laden and decision support environments, in mind, it combines non-persistent relational storage with object-based application logic for data sources up to 1Tb in size. Unisys has Bell Communications Research Inc, Morristown, New Jersey as an early win and says it has been waiting for a market for Osmos to develop for the last year or so. It says Osmos differs from offerings from the likes of Illustra Information Technologies Inc, UniSQL Inc, Versant Object Technology Inc, Object Design Inc and Ontos Inc by dint of the amount of transaction data it can handle – it stems from Unisys’s 2200 and A series mainframe development efforts. The team took a long look at relational trends and the way semantic and object-type capabilities including referential integrity and stored procedures were being implemented. These offerings enable the relational databases to go some way in pushing the application code down to the server, but Unisys says they stop halfway, failing to take advantage of all the object database techniques available. Relational databases fail to embrace encapsulation, which enables extensibility and re-use; as a result stored procedures in the relational database use proprietary languages and rely on programmers to code most of the data integrity features. Osmos applications win out over comparable relational database applications, Unisys says, because of the increased responsibilities the database assumes and by the delivery of mechanisms such as abstract data types, hierarchies and bi-directional relationships, which provide more flexible data structures, enabling the user to grapple with real world business problems. It’s not about to throw out the baby with the bath water, however, and has adopted relational techniques such as SQL3 and set-based querying in Osmos. Cocking a snook at object databases, it says persistent storage for object-oriented programming has typically developed with application design tools such as computer-aided design and software engineering in mind. Osmos is geared for mission-critical applications, which sits uncomfortably with persistent storage. Computer-aided design or software engineering applications typically load a lot of objects into local memory, manipulate them and store them back in the database, Unisys says. A transaction processing and decision support environment uses multiple versions of an object, involving querying and constant updating, where locking objects for long periods is not practical. Osmos is up under Unisys Unix System V.4, Solaris, Dynix/ptx, UnixWare and NT at from $42,500 for 32 users.
