Mapping the Real World

The vision of having the real world map into software have been the dream of Object Oriented concept. But yet after over the decades, this vision have never come close to reality. Is such a vision is just impossible, overly expensive or just plain impractical?

Fully Normalized Schema

For data designer, a 100% normalize data schema is desirable but is it possible? The obvious benefit of a fully normalized database is the total elimination of data duplication, whilst the major problem with fully normalized schema is performance degradation due to the additional tables and its relational linking. But have any researching data scientist ever empirically determine the relationship between a fully normalize database and its performance?

Object Oriented Database

While object oriented features has a rather common definition among the various object oriented programming languages, such common definition do not apply to object oriented database, How should concept such as inheritance, abstract data type, polymorphism and etc be apply to object oriented databases?

Abstraction Layer

The primary objective of an object oriented database is to enable the software development community to have access to standardize real world objects with persistence capability where its standard information is built in and its customization can be specialize through object oriented features such as inheritance.

"The essence of abstractions is preserving information that is relevant in a given context, and forgetting information that is irrelevant in that context." – John V. Guttag

Performance vs Re-usability

Object oriented is a concept where its main objective is software re-usability. Object oriented give us the principal where all software developers could come to a consensus for adherence to a re-usability concept. When implemented on relational database, object oriented requires highly normalize schema and causes expensive row joins, can the performance degradation be overcome?

Try Out

For more information and details, its best to get practical, start by downloading our latest release and try it out https://github.com/shujutech/StORMi

The Next Step

Our experience with Java Object Relational Mapping is the first step to bring re-usable database technologies for various business applications. Definitely, the additional mapping layer between the application, the orm and the lower relational design is an impedance than can be eliminated for better performance and efficency. The next step is to bring all the experience with such orm into a fully working object database.