An object-oriented database management system (OODBMS, but sometimes just called “object database”) is a DBMS that stores data in a logical model that is closely aligned with an application program’s object model. Of course, an OODBMS will have a physical data model optimized for the kinds of logical data model it expects.

If you’re guessing from that definition that there can be difficulties drawing boundaries between the application, the application programming language, the data manipulation language, and/or the DBMS — you’re right. Those difficulties have been a big factor in relegating OODBMS to being a relatively niche technology to date.

Examples of what I would call OODBMS include: 

• Intersystems Cache’, the most successful OODBMS product by far, with good OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) capabilities and a strong presence in the health care market. Although it was designed around the specialized MUMPS/M language, Cache’ happily talks Java and SQL.
• ObjectStore, a well-pedigreed startup a couple decades ago, which wound up focusing on complex objects in markets such as computer-aided design. ObjectStore was eventually sold to Progress Software, which is positioning ObjectStore more as a distributed caching system than anything else (Amazon was an impressive reference for that use case). That said, Progress’ ObjectStore business is small, as is its ObjectStore level of effort. Both Cache’ and ObjectStore were at some point unsuccessfully targeted at the XML database market.
• Part of Workday’s technology stack. Very-well-pedigreed SaaS (Software as a Service) application vendor Workday decided to go with what amounts to an in-memory OODBMS. This makes all kinds of sense, and is a lot of what rekindled my interest in object-oriented database management.
• Objectivity, also from the 20-years-ago generation, and a poster child for the “DBMS toolkit as much as a DBMS” issue.
• McObject Perst, an embeddable memory-centric OODBMS.
• Versant. Actually, by now the Versant company has several different OODBMS; I’m not sure whether what it’s selling has much to do with the original Versant product. Anyhow, both the original and current Versant product seem to be positioned in OLTP. Versant has recently suffered from declining revenues, in license fees and maintenance alike.
• Forthcoming technology from Starcounter, in the area of high-performance memory-centric OLTP. According to my correspondents, Starcounter still needs to explain how its technology is different from what Versant and ObjectStore introduced 20 or so years ago. Interestingly, while ObjectStore shines as a distributed system, Starcounter’s developers have consigned scale-out to the “too hard to bother with” category.
• Gemstone, which seemed to be on an ObjectStore-like caching track until it was acquired by VMware.

Arguably, OODBMS have all the benefits of document-model DBMS, but with different language bindings. And if you’re going to write in an object-oriented language anyway, those language bindings can seem pretty appealing. In particular, they might be preferable to fighting your way through object/relational mapping.

Other than the double-edged language sword, the main criticism of object-oriented DBMS is that they include a whole lot of pointers. Intersystems and others have shown that, even in a disk-centric world, OODBMS can have excellent performance in OLTP and tolerable performance in simple reporting. As RAM gets cheaper, memory-centric operation becomes ever more viable, making the pointers even less problematic.

Bottom line: If I were starting a SaaS project today, I’d give serious consideration to memory-centric OODBMS technology.

• Personally selected annual lists of 12 “Most influential” companies and 36 “Companies to watch” in analytics- and database-related sectors.
• Made it clear that these are his personal selections.
• Nonetheless has called it an Editors’ Choice list, rather than Editor’s Choice.

(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)

People advising Doug — who come to think of it actually are Contributing Editors to Intelligent Enterprise or something like that — included Cindi Howson, Seth Grimes, three others, and me.

And if past is prologue, I will now get a flood of PR emails calling my attention to this award that I already have both participated in and blogged about.

As usual, the sense:nonsense ratio on these lists was pleasingly high. Analytic DBMS vendors cited included IBM, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, Sybase, and Teradata in the “Most influential” group, with Aster, Greenplum, HP, Infobright, and Vertica among the “To watch” crowd. It’s tough to argue with those selections, whose most questionable element is probably the not-ridiculous supposition that HP could do something interesting over the coming year. Cloudera and Intersystems also made the list, deservedly.

All three of QlikTech, Tableau, and TIBCO made the list, which is appropriate given the potential for and interest in interactive data exploration technology.  The BI majors, independent or otherwise, were all on as well. In text mining, Doug included Attensity and Clarabridge, which I think is exactly right. (Plus OpenCalais.)  Upon reflection, I probably should have nominated Mark Logic, even though most of its business is non-enterprise; but hey, nobody’s perfect, and the same goes for lists. Open source was well represented, with Apache, Actuate, Jaspersoft, Eclipse, Infobright, Nuxeo and R all being cited (but not Ingres or Pentaho). Kalido made the list, with my endorsement, their silly I-CASE like marketing messaging notwithstanding.

Speaking of imperfections — there only are a few category names, and so category assignments can be pretty bizarre. (In an ideal world, middleware wouldn’t be included under “enterprise applications”.) Greenplum hasn’t really “extended” its DBMS with a “cloud” option. As much as I’d like Netezza to be more influential than SAP, that’s probably not the best way to rank them. And there are a number of “This company is on a roll!” kinds of comments that I wouldn’t necessarily endorse.

But those are all nitpicks. On the whole, it’s another nice job.

• MUMPS, the original Intersystems technology, was focused on health care.
• The reasons Intersystems went object-oriented have a lot to do with the structure of health-care records.
• Intersystems’ biggest and most visible ISVs are in the health-care area.
• Intersystems is actually beginning to sell an electronic health records system called TrakCare around the world (but not in the US, where it has lots of large competitive VARs).

Note: Intersystems Cache’ is sold mainly through VARs (Value-Added Resellers), aka ISVs/OEMs. I.e., it’s sold by people who write applications on top of it.

So far as I understand – and this is still pretty vague and apt to be partially erroneous – the Intersystems Cache’ technical story goes something like this:

• Intersystems Cache’ is an object-oriented DBMS.
• The preferred language for talking to Intersystems Cache’ is Java.
• Intersystems claims Cache’ has good SQL performance, for most kinds of use-case.
• Intersystems Cache’ stores data in a kind of sparse hierarchy. It uses a lot of “common character count” compression, which sounds a lot to me like Patricia tries.
• Intersystems has recently bundled some BI/reporting tools into the Cache’ stack. Surely not coincidentally, Intersystems once told me that some of its ISVs paid more to Crystal Reports than to Intersystems.
• Intersystems Cache’ has had Sybase emulation for several years, and just added Informix emulation. Most but not all stored procedures from those other DBMS run against Cache’ as well.
• Intersystems Cache’ recently added a bunch of manageability, security, etc. features, the details of which generally inspired “Oh, you didn’t have that earlier?” reactions in me.
• Intersystems’ just did a revamp of the Cache’ object model to make it more Smalltalk-like, in which messages are set to parent rather than child classes when appropriate. Thus, when you recompile a class, you don’t also have to recompile all its children, and incremental recompilation is now near-instantaneous. (Put that one in the “Oh, you didn’t have that earlier?” category too.) Versioning will be better as well.
• In the latest release, Cache’ has added what Intersystems calls “Java Event Processing.” This doesn’t sound like CEP (Complex Event Processing), and I forgot to ask whether it was memory-centric at all. Anyhow, the idea is to bang objects into the database really quickly, having them be immediately available for SQL query. “Really quickly” means >10,000 objects/core/second, with one test at the European Space Agency getting up to 85,000. By way of contrast, Intersystems asserts (based on bake-offs) that RDBMS competitors have to insert into BLOBs to get competitive performance, with associated loss of queryability.

Finally, a few financial highlights:

• Intersystems did a little over $1/4 billion in revenue in 2009.
• 85% of that was Cache’.
• Revenue growth was slightly positive in 2009, and 15% in 2008.
• Headcount growth was 25% in 2009 and is planned to be big again in 2010, after being modest in prior years.

]]> http://www.dbms2.com/2010/01/15/intersystems-cache-highlights/feed/ 5 http://www.dbms2.com/2008/09/23/operational-bi-bpm-business-rules/ http://www.dbms2.com/2008/09/23/operational-bi-bpm-business-rules/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:01:59 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.dbms2.com/?p=566 Intersystems is rolling out DeepSee, which is a Cache’-specific BI engine. Since some Intersystems OEMs have been known to pay more money to Business Objects/Crystal Reports than to Intersystems itself, the business motivation is obvious. Technically, Intersystems’ claims include:

• Intersystems integrated true bitmapped indexes into Cache’ 4-5 years ago, and hence can do fast queries.
• In particular, the queries are fast enough for operational BI.
• The whole thing, even in Release 1, has a decent feature set.

So far, this is basically Intersystems playing catchup in an area where RDBMS vendors are naturally strong, and hence my eyes glaze over a bit.

But a couple of the app stories associated with this announcement sound like real operational BI, and those are always cool. One is from a VAR called Quadramed, which uses a dashboard to figure out how well business rules are using, allowing end users to change the rules on the fly accordingly. (At that point in the briefing I suggested they reach out to business rules — excuse me, “decision management” — enthusiast James Taylor, who might like that story. ) Another story involved Business Process Management (BPM) for an integrated set of medical laboratory tests.

I tripped across another cool-sounding story yesterday, in a pretty specialized area — Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management, which evidently relies pretty heavily on a business rules engine too. (I think the business rules are there mainly to estimate your usage, because we all know that just billing based on what the meter says would be way too simple … .)

*In general, my criticisms of Intersystems’ stealth marketing are beginning to be relaxed. On the other hand, if you want to be technical, I still haven’t actually talked with the company for years …

I spoke briefly with Mark Conner, founder of Mars Medical and now EVP of NoteWorthy, about why he so loves Cache’. (I asked what he disliked about the product; his response was an emphatic “Nothing”.) It basically boils down to two reasons:

• Mark thinks hierarchical data models are a great fit for medical applications. For example, the application’s UI (and local schema) look quite different depending on which particular complaints or diagnoses apply to particular patient visits.

• Cache’ just runs and runs w/o DBA intervention. Mark cited a figure of two support engineers for Mars Medical, supporting over 1,000 medical (largely group) practices, almost none of which have DBAs.

The latter feature is crucial to small ISVs selling application software to even smaller users, and is a big part of why Progress and Intersystems have large share in that market. More generally, it’s the most important and common technical advantage that mid-range database management systems generally enjoy versus the market leaders. (The other big advantage, of course, is pricing.)

• Almost everybody has some kind of XML datatype, and SQL extensions to permit its use.
• Almost everybody supports one or both of the two easy relational XML integrations:
  • XML as a BLOb/CLOb, but with extra indexing. The disadvantage of this is that you can’t retrieve data inside a document without bringing the whole document back.
  • Shredded XML. Assuming the shredding is automatic, the big disadvantage of this that performance can be lousy for complex XML that doesn’t fit naturally into tabular formats. But, a lot of XML was generated from relational databases for data interchange purposes, and in those cases shredding it back into tables may make perfect sense. (Of course, if the shredding has to be manual, there’s a nasty initial DBA burden. Also, anything that challenges performance in an RDBMS is likely to create ongoing DBA challenges.)
• The majors also claim to have more or less native XML implementations. However, to the best of my knowledge these are not oozing with customer success.
  • IBM has a very nice architecture, with a separate optimized XML engine integrated into DB2. However, performance is for some reason ghastly.
  • Microsoft has a BLOb/CLOb approach, but without the standard drawback of same, in that you can retrieve part of a document. But I’m not aware of happy users.
  • Oracle, later to the party than IBM or Microsoft, now claims a “binary” option that sounds fairly native. (By this I mean “native” in the industry-standard sense, not in the bogus sense that Oracle used to claim.) But I’m not aware of user experiences.
• Mark Logic is the acknowledged star of XML database management.
• Intersystems Cache’, despite not being focused on XML, is one of the better-performing alternatives.

But for most applications at any enterprise – and for all applications at most enterprises – super high-end DBMS aren’t required. There are relatively few applications that wouldn’t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB today. Ingres and Progress OpenEdge aren’t far behind (they’re a little lacking in datatype support). Ditto Intersystems Cache’, although the nonrelational architecture will be off-putting to many. And to varying degrees, you can also do fine with MySQL, Pervasive PSQL, MaxDB, or a variety of other products – or for that matter with the cheap or free crippled versions of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Informix.

What’s more, these mid-range database management systems can have significant advantages over their high-end brethren. The biggest is often price, for licenses and maintenance alike. Beyond that, they can be much easier to administer then their more complex counterparts. For example, Progress OpenEdge and Informix SE have long been reseller favorites, in large part because they can be installed at small businesses and locations that lack technical staff, and rarely if ever require DBA attention. Programming and hardware costs can sometimes be lower as well.

And what these mid-range DBMS don’t do today, they likely will do soon. In the 1990s, Microsoft SQL Server was the mid-range entry threatening to disrupt the market. But it’s grown up quite nicely. EnterpriseDB is equal or superior in every way I can think of to Oracle7, a few security certifications perhaps excepted. (They’d probably argue the release number in that claim should be 1 or 2 higher, but I’d have to compare their multimedia support to what I recall of Oracle 8.1.5 before I agreed.)

Will these mid-range database management systems truly “disrupt” the DBMS market, as many open source advocates hope? Or will they be largely co-opted into the oligopoly, as Microsoft SQL Server was? That’s a discussion for another time. For now, please just keep your mind open to DBMS alternatives – the high-end approach is not always the best.

EDIT: For a contrary view, please see my follow-up post making the opposite case.

Please subscribe to our feed!

And it’s not just me. Two personal data points about Intersystems’ self-defeating lack of visibility include:

• A nontrivial ISV is evaluating OODBMS for a nontrivial OLTP app. Cache’ — the obvious #1 choice — isn’t even being considered, because they know so little about the product. I suggested Cache’, but they shot back a qualifying question I couldn’t answer, because I’m so out of touch with the company and product myself.
• A client of mine that’s a medical-app ISV was indeed evaluating Cache’, as they should be — but was hugely impressed that I’d heard of such an obscure product.

I probably should stop talking about the company. While their story sounds very good in parts, I don’t have enough confidence in what I’ve heard to feel comfortable proposing them anywhere outside their flagship medical vertical market.

In one note, he says that IBM is claiming a 2-5X XML performance improvement. This is a good step, since one of my clients who evaluated such engines dismissed IBM early on for being an order of magnitude too slow. That client ultimately chose Marklogic, with Cache’ having been the only other choice to make the short list.

Speaking of IBM, I flew back from the Business Objects conference next to a guy who supports IMS. He told me that IBM has bragged of an actual new customer win for IMS within the past couple of years (a large bank in China). I feel similarly about IMS getting a new account as I do about Tony Bennett being a current pop star — they’re proof that there’s no such thing as “too old to succeed.”

Keep getting great research about database management, analytics, and related technologies. Get a FREE subscription by RSS or email!

Technorati Tags: IBM, IMS, XML database, Marklogic

Anyhow, while I’m not at liberty to explain more of my reasoning (i.e., to disclose my evidence) — Cache’ should be taken seriously as an XML DBMS alternative … even if I never can seem to get a proper DBMS briefing from them (which is far from entirely being their fault).