November 29, 1999

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Object Databases Move To The Middle
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Kennedy also likes being freed from having to handle many of the post-transactional details. "IVendor provides its database to us," he says, "and we can merchandise products within our content." Cybergrrl then becomes the vendor of record, while iVendor takes care of online credit-card processing, shipping and packing, and customer service.

As more companies realize the benefits of the Extensible Markup Language, vendors are finding new ways to approach this market, and companies are seeing definite benefits to deploying object databases at the hub of their integration projects. The XML trend will continue to shake itself out, of course. Says Gartner Group's Varma, "Most everybody has a story about managing in-memory data and XML. It's very early in the XML game and it's still too early for anybody to claim victory or defeat."

Hoping to end up on the winning side, Object Design Inc. in Burlington Mass., was founded on an object-database product, ObjectStore, and has positioned itself squarely in the XML space. The company sells eXcelon, a midtier, XML-based data-integration server that manages the flow of information between IT systems, business-to-consumer applications, and business-to-business information exchange applications.

"I think XML is going to explode," says Coco Jaenicke, manager of product marketing and XML evangelist for Object Design. "I think it's going to be the underlying format for all information. Technically, XML has every feature you need; it stands up to the job. And the industry is supporting it, so it's free of political perils."

XML and object databases would seem to be a potent combination. David Hoag, VP of development at Java engineering and consulting firm ObjectWave, says object-oriented database-management system technology is superior when it comes to storing XML.

"The component model for XML is complex enough that to store it in a relational database isn't practical," Hoag says. "In the relational-database world, you have to worry about foreign key references, the depth of the model. There is a lot more complexity in mapping an XML component model to a relational model." Mapping an XML component model to a relational database requires hundreds and hundreds of round trips, Hoag says, whereas the object database simply returns the object structure. "In an XML situation, the object database will win out in performance and simplicity," he says.

Other object-database technology is greener still, at least in that it is being recycled and used in new ways. Fresher Information Corp. provides "outsourced content infrastructure," information aggregation and search services that Web sites can buy or co-brand. After acquiring the object-oriented Matisse technology, Fresher has incorporated the now proprietary database into its Web solutions. Fresher is being employed by NetNoir Inc., the owner of NetNoir.com, an African-American community-resource portal in which America Online has a 20% stake.

NetNoir, in San Francisco, needed a fast internal search engine to handle a high number of requests, so it outsourced to Fresher. Says E. David Ellington, CEO and president of NetNoir, "Our search engine is very fast. Fresher technology is best of breed--no one else could do it so quickly and so efficiently. It's a great customer experience."

In the past, companies had difficulty creating Web sites quickly enough. "Today, the challenge is that too much information is coming in," says Scott Rafer, Fresher's president and CEO. According to Rafer, Fresher's object-oriented technology handles indexing tasks in 90 seconds or less.

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Photo of Ellington by Andy Freeberg

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