November 29, 1999

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Object Databases Move To The Middle
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Despite the importance of the Web as a driver for object-database technology, object-oriented database-management systems still have a home in more-traditional environments. A major design initiative launched by the U.S. Navy is a case in point.

Trident Systems Group Inc. in Fairfax, Va., is a systems-engineering company with 15 years' experience in the design and development of large and complex projects. It uses Interchange, a design database Trident developed based on Computer Associates' Jasmine for Navy project DD21, the next generation of land attack destroyers under development.

Trident is part of one of two industry teams vying for the $60 billion project. Trident's team includes Boeing, Ingalls Shipbuilding, and Raytheon Systems. "This is extremely high-stakes poker," says Mike Casey, engineering services program manager at Trident. "And the Navy is using unprecedented, nontraditional methods for determining how to build the DD21."

"The Navy came to us to help them manage an extremely large and complex body of design information," Casey says. "The reason we had to use an object-oriented database-management system was because no other storage system offers the kind of sophistication we need to represent all of these kinds of design information. The class structure is huge."

"Our primary use of Jasmine's object-oriented architecture is as an enterprise application repository," says David Britton, director of Trident's technology and development division. "It provides configuration management of the data and the sharing of the data. It shares between engineering cost tools, functional knowledge tools--we use it like a translation mechanism."

Although many object databases are hidden at the core of value-added products or services such as Interchange, some end-user companies are perfectly comfortable cracking the shrink wrap themselves.

CUNA Mutual Group in Madison, Wis., is a financial-services provider for credit unions and their members. To compete with larger financial institutions, CUNA Mutual needed to expand the range of products its credit unions offered their customers. Objectivity Inc.'s Objectivity/DB lets CUNA Mutual manage the large volumes of data required to show the total customer-relationship picture and provide better service and cross-selling capabilities. The company offers a broad range of insurance products, such as property and casualty, plus consumer products such as mutual funds and life insurance.

According to Bob Ferderer, CUNA Mutual's VP of information and technology services, scalability and transaction speed were key issues. "Objectivity gave us the ability to handle millions of complex relationships. I wanted an online database with one-second response time that could query anything in it, and I needed to merge and match individuals with relationships," Ferderer says. "The other important component was that we knew we needed to get into reusable object technology."

In spite of, or perhaps even because of, their advantages, object databases might never gain the same status as relational databases. Anne Thomas, an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group, says she doesn't see a huge resurgence in the object-oriented database-management system market. On the other hand, she says, the Web is "definitely driving renewed interest in object-oriented databases." She explains that the language of the Web is objects--Java, XML, or Corba--and these map poorly to a relational database. "That's where an object-oriented database excels. Storing by object is fast," Thomas says. And "fast" is what people want.

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Photo of Ferderer by Bruce Fritz

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