From: Atri Rudra (atri@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Sun Apr 25 2004 - 23:00:14 PDT
Of Objects: A Decade of Turmoil
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The authors identify four "hot" database research thrusts in 1986 and
fast forward to 1996 (when this paper was written) and look at the
"aftermath". They also "prophetize" the state of commercial databases in
2006 and outline research topics they thought would be important.
The four thrusts were: extended relational database systems which
basically is extending the relational database system to support user defined
abstract data types (ADT); persistent programming languages which is
extending an object oriented programming language to make the objects
atomic; object-oriented database systems which basically is accessing a
database through a object oriented programming language and database
system toolkits/components which provides kernels of the database at
different level with toolkits to build domain-specific databases. By 1996,
database system toolkits and persistent programming languages were a
commercial failure while object oriented databases had failed to live up to
their promised expectations. Extended relational databases systems which
in some sense was the simplest among the four was the sole "survivor".
The authors also highlight certain issues which would have to be tackled
by 2006. I am not familiar with the current state of research in the
database community but the issues of caching and parallelism are
interesting. From what I have heard databases have really bad on chip
cache performance and that they are notoriously difficult to
parallelize, so I am curious at what level the authors were talking
about caching and parallelism [of course what I have "heard" maybe all
wrong :-)]
The paper seems to be a "visionary" paper: other than the fact that this
one passes "judgment" on different areas and "predict" the future.
Also this is the only technical paper I have read which has sentences
ending in [...] instead of a period [.].
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