Background

The 1980's saw the rise of object-oriented concepts as an acceptable solution for software development. In particular was the use of Object-Oriented Programming languages, such as Smalltalk and C++ in building applications. By the nineties O-O languages were seen as a more viable solution for programming applications than non-O-O languages.

It was at about this time that people started to recognise the flaws present in commercial implementations of relational databases. Some of these flaws were brought about by the change in the demands of industry in particular the rise of media rich commercial environments, through e-commerce and telecommunications booms, placed demands for databases that could support new types (i.e. jpeg). This and other demands could not be met by existing relational databases thus a new solution was required.

Enter the Object-Oriented Database (OODB), an amalgamation of the O-O concept and DBMS capability - thus a solution for persistent object handling. Martin (1993) describes OODB's as being based on the object and using the same conceptual models as Object-Oriented Analysis, Object-Oriented Design and Object-Oriented Programming.

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