The author will not pretend to be unbiased in the matter of comparing the deductive and object-oriented approaches to new database systems; he believes that despite some important concepts originating with the object-oriented approach, the deductive family of systems will ultimately dominate. We shall explore some of the reasons why the two approaches do not mix well. Fortunately, most of the features of object-oriented database systems can be incorporated in deductive systems (but not vice-versa). Then we argue that declarativeness is important for at least some of the new applications, and that declarative languages cannot be object-oriented in a nontrivial way. We next contrast the approaches with regard to the way they classify data elements. We close with an examination of the prospects for "classless" data, which is motivated by the prospect of databases where the number of distinct classes would be too large to name systematically. There are a number of challenges to implementin...