Abstract

A decade ago, the connection between objects and databases was new and was being explored in a number of di erent ways within our community. Driven by the perception that managing traditional business data was largely a solved problem, projects data types to relational databases and building extensible database systems, objectoriented database systems, and toolkits for constructing special-purpose database systems. In addition, work was underway elsewhere in the computer science research community on extending programming languages with database-inspired features such aspersistence and transactions. In this paper, we take a look at where our eld was a decade ago and where it is now in terms of database support for objects (and vice versa). We look both at research projects and at commercial database products. We share our vision and our biases about the future of objects and databases, and we identify anumber of research challenges that remain to be addressed in order to ultimately achieve our vision.

Citations