San Francisco Ð NeXT and Object Design (ODI), of Burlington, Massachusetts, have joined forces in an attempt to create a new standard for object-oriented storage and database technology.
At Object World here in late July, NeXT CEO Steve Jobs called ODI the "Adobe of object-oriented databases," claiming the company's ObjectStore software was destined to become the standard means of storing objects across multiple platforms.
Jobs called object-oriented storage a natural extension to NeXT's existing object-oriented environment. "Object-oriented storage is the primary hill that is left to climb, and we're going to climb it," he said.
Currently, there are only limited mechanisms to support the maintenance of objects in NeXTSTEP.
"There's a revolution happening in database technology that is parallel to what happened with SQL," Jobs said. "Slowly but surely ODBMS will take over from the relational database."
Object Design will port ObjectStore 2.0 to NeXTSTEP Release 3.0. Ultimately, NeXT and ODI will codevelop a version that will be largely embedded in the operating system. The new software will be freely licensed to third parties, much as Display PostScript is today.
According to William L. Blundon, ODI vice-president of marketing, an ODBMS is designed to meet the development needs of the future. "A relational database is application software that is very good at doing short, simple transactions using text and data. An ODBMS contains both applications and system software that can handle all forms of data and can do transactions as fast as you can move the mouse, all the way up to transactions that take a couple of weeks."
An ODBMS goes beyond the traditional relational model by supporting multimedia data types, including graphics, audio, and video and by including powerful distributed-object management capabilities. Additionally, an ODBMS drastically reduces the time required to create advanced transaction systems.
Other vendors of object-oriented storage technology were taken aback by the announcement. Versant Object Technology, of Menlo Park, California, announced plans to port its ODBMS to the NeXT on the same day that NeXT and ODI announced their plans. Matthew Miller, director of corporate marketing for Versant, downplayed the alliance: "We have customers for our NeXT object database. That's more important than a strategic alliance."