Product Specifics

Objectivity

The Objectivity DB product from Objectivity is aimed at the high-end market -- OEMs, ISVs, and large companies. Its customers include Motorola, Citibank, CERN, and Fermi Laboratories. Applications include process control, telecommunications, and scientific applications. The product provides real-time data acquisition and is extremely scalable. It has an ODBC tool that lets it use SQL for reporting. Backup and recovery include fault-tolerant options.

ObjectStore

Larry Alston, director of product management at Object Design, believes that an ODBMS allows true "multimedia" performance because objects are mapped directly. ObjectStore, Object Design's database product, is aimed at distributed Web applications as well as more conventional database applications. ObjectStore has been used in these areas: finance, education, publishing, and telecommunications.

Versant

Versant has the capability to dynamically modify its schema. Dynamic languages such as Java, Smalltalk, and C++ can define a class within an application, instantiate it, and then modify it. After this class modification, Versant will automatically and transparently evolve the instances of the modified class as they are used. In short, a class is as easy to change as an object.

Poet

According to Dirk Bartles, CEO of Poet Software, the Poet Object Database is the only object-database product designed for Windows applications. It is compact, with a footprint of less than 1 MB, and is comfortable on a single machine or on a network. Poet supports Java, C++, and ActiveX as well as OQL. Although there are no tools for backup and recovery, it does include transaction rollback and recovery features. There are Poet databases currently running in the 16-GB range with 150 concurrent users.

Jasmine

Computer Associates believes that object-relational databases cannot support complex objects completely. It tried for over six months to combine the two and could not come out with a viable hybrid. The company designed Jasmine in cooperation with Fujitsu to be an object-oriented database and application-development system that is multimedia- and Internet-aware. It has a small-footprint execution system so that it can become a Web-browser plug-in. Jasmine has a multimedia authoring tool and connectivity to the major relational databases. It comes with a class library, all packaged as JADE (Jasmine's Application Development Environment).

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Point-and-Click Web Publ ishing

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ObjectForms allows you to see what is inside an ObjectStore database and publish it to a Web site via simple point-and-click commands.

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You Can Drag Them to the Application and Make Them Work

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With Jasmine, you can drag objects directly from the database and drop them onto an application scene.