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# Why Use ODB

ODB Feature | Benefit from using OFB | Advantage to other technologies
Object Oriented Data Model | Supports OO modelling of data which means that complex data can be modelled using the powerful tools that OO provides | The relational model, e.g., MS SQL Server, Oracle... databases do not offer a true OO database. Hence, any of these products will not prform well with complex data (i.e., a number of n-n relations with a substantial number of data items
Main Memory Database | All data in main memory. As main memory is becomming increasingly cheaper main memory databases are becomming a reality. Benchmarking of ODB has shown that even on an 8 Mb machine running OS/2 50000 objects of average size is posible. ODB is optimized towards main memory utilisation where a vast number of measusers has been taken to optimise the main memory utilisation of ODB | Standard databases, e.g., MS SQL Server, Oracle etc... are diskbased where data is cached in and out of main memory hence, a main memory database will outperform any diskbased database for any type of operation
Light Weight | In std databases logging and locking is a central part of the database. In ODB these features may be disabeled for greater performance. With loggin and locking disabeled ODB is a light weight database engine. Some of the application ODB is tailored towards will benefit from using ODB in light weight mode, See ODB Applications | MS SQL Server, or Oracle cannot be run in light weight mode. Other OO databases eg., ObjectStore can tailor their locking granule etc., to get database behaviour tailored towards the application
Data Independece | The model of the data is independet of your application model. Hence, Your application (C++,VB, java program) do not need to be touched if you change the way the data is modelled. | Using standard OO databases like ObjectStore the datamodel of you r application is closely linked to your data model since your data model is pre processed into C++ and comiled, linked with your application.
Application Address Space | Your application runs in the same address space as ODB, hence the ODB objects (your data) is directly accessible in your application without any data conversions or other tideous and resource consuming operations | Using MS SQL Server or any other relation database server the problem of Impedance Mismatch, i.e., discrepancies is supported data types, is a major problem that causes significant overhead at runtime. ODB has completely eliminated this overhead without sacrificing data independence
Stand Alone or Client - Server | You can use ODB as the stand alone data manager for your client or in a Client - Server setup. In both cases the processing is done at the client, in the client server setup all updates need to be commited to the server. | MS SQL Server or any other traditional RDBMS do not provide this flexibility, also they adhere to the outdated client server model where the server must be a high end machine since it does all the processing. Using ODB the load is distributed over the network instaed of concentrated to the server.
Use ODB in light weight mode at client as data manager | Increased Productivity | Using MFC's or STL in application development a lot of effort will be put in to develop the data management at the client. Using ODB as the data manager at the client this effort is substantially reduced, hence your project will be both more robust and also faster through the development phase
The ODB data file is selfcontained and be shared between and correlated ODB sites | Information Sharing and cross database correlation | ODB kernels can open any number of databases and correlate the data between the databases. Using MS SQL server or other similar products sharing data and data models are not simple.

| ODB for Win95 / NT An Object-Oriented Database V. 0.1 Mail to ODB for Win 95 / NT |