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November 29, 1999

Object Databases Move To The Middle
Despite the prevalence of relational databases, vendors are making use of the technology

By Mary Stearns Sgarioto

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he market tug-of-war between object-oriented and relational databases is long over, and it's clear that relational databases remain the chief custodians of business information. Object-database technology has always had a lot of gee-whiz value, but most vendors have had difficulty making big money with it. Merv Adrian, VP at Giga Information Group, says, "It's a zero-billion-dollar market, and will remain one for some time to come."

But object databases are hardly extinct. Rather than fight a losing battle on the back end, vendors are finding new ways to exploit this technology on the middle tier. For the past 10 to 15 years, according to Gartner Group's Sanjeev Varma, object-oriented database-management system vendors competing on the database tier have not proven especially successful. "In certain niches there is a lot of value to this technology; it's just that those niches aren't that big," Varma says.

According to John Singer, program director for application delivery strategies at Meta Group, object databases are finding a comfortable home as code repositories within more-specialized servers. "While the highly granular nature of Web site visual components seem to be a natural fit for object-oriented database-management systems, we see the technology primarily as infrastructure embedded within other solutions," Singer says. "Object-oriented database-management products are evolving towards Java application servers, persistence managers, and XML interchange as a means of adding value above the basic database functionality."

Java's importance to object databases should not be underestimated. Says George Franzen, chief technology officer of Versant Corp., "With the emergence of Java, many companies are looking to augment their infrastructure. The business-to-business consumer wants seamless integration using midtier technology involving objects and Java."

Franzen cites middleware as a key component of a scalable transactional system. "Using an object-oriented database is the easiest way to build applications," he says. "The database supports transactional activity added into the middle tier without creating a new, uncontrolled workload for the existing enterprise system."

Photo of Kennedy by Giorgio Palmisano Startup iVendor Inc. embeds Versant's object-oriented database-management system into its end-to-end E-commerce services, offering an all-Java, turnkey E-merchandising network. "One of the most important components is the database," says Kee Ong, president and CEO of iVendor. "It contains all the catalog information about the products and suppliers." Storing products as objects is ideal, because it gives iVendor the flexibility to let different stores offer the same items at different prices.

Relational-database technology made little sense for Ong's service offerings. "If we use the relational model, the performance would kill us," he says. "It would be 10 times slower."

Cybergrrl Inc. in New York builds relationships with its Generation-X female community through a midsize Web site dedicated to encouraging women and girls to embrace technology and make it part of their everyday lives. With 3 million impressions and 350,000 to 500,000 unique visits per month, Cybergrrl is an iVendor beta partner and will soon launch iVendor's E-commerce back end.

CEO Kevin Kennedy co-founded Cybergrrl with president Aliza "Cybergrrl" Sherman in 1995. With iVendor, Cybergrrl has the same buying power as a larger site, Kennedy says. "It allows us price flexibility. It makes Cybergrrl competitive with Amazon.com or CDnow.com from a pricing perspective."

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