“Dueling Databases: Which is best?” [1] Group 20: SeungHwan Chung Pronay Mukherjee April 20th, 2011 (last modified in July 16th, 2011 by TA)

Quote "Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.“ – Dave Barry Barry was referring to a home computer, Imagine the effort required to set up a business system, which needs to be robust, reliable, highly scalable, secure, and fully available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day and 365 days per year. Most industry have continued to rely on relational database platforms like Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to power their business-critical software systems. These databases provide the optimum technology foundation for the complex, deadline-driven, multimedia environments.

Object-oriented database A few industry suppliers have introduced editorial content management systems based on object-oriented database: - Versant - InterSystems (Caché) - Objectivity - GemStone. Proponents of object-oriented databases often cite the following three main advantages over relational database technologies: They run faster for transactional applications. They offer better developer productivity. They are easier to manage.

Oject-oriented database platforms - Limitations: - These platforms are lacking in functionality, reliability and media industry experience. - Some industry vendors have taken a "best of both worlds" approach, engineering object-relational mapping tools to provide customers with the rapid response of object-oriented development while allowing the back-end to remain on robust Oracle or SQL Server database platforms. - Yet the fact remains that databases such as Oracle and SQL Server are superior to smaller, lesser well-known object-oriented database (OODB) architectures.

Why Oracle and SQL Server > OODB : - Consistently better performance. - Performance benchmarking tests - Sophisticated data locking - Optimal mix of secure data management - Load-balanced support for concurrent database requests - Better, more flexible tools for querying and accessing content. - Sophisticated queries to access and report on content and metadata - Queries can be created and run by end-users - Optimized performance through the use of stored procedures - B uilt-in tools for constructing and executing ad-hoc queries

Why (Cont’d): -More secure database environment for business-critical applications. - C2 Certification - Microsoft SQL Server - 19 established and validated security certificates - Oracle -A lot more trained resources available vs – Database experience - Oracle (19,813); SQL Server (14,702);Versant (3); Caché (20) - Available jobs for each database platform - Switching from a relational to an OO database – Extra expense

In Conclusion: OODB solutions like Versant and Caché - Advantages - Tightly coupled with the application - Simplifies both the design and the coding process - Helps speed up development times -The downside - Lost flexibility - Software agility Oracle and SQL Server - applications are loosely coupled - valuable abstraction layer sitting between the applications and the database - database schema changes can be made independently of the actual applications.

Reference [1]The slides are prepared by SeungHwan Chung and Pronay Mukherjee, and the content of slides comes from whitepaper: Dueling databases: Which is best? Peter Marsh, June 1, 2008, bf3e-e7134c08853e.html