A Performance Study of Object Database Management Systems

Vendors of Object Database Management Systems (ODBMSs) have used a number of different architectural approaches for their products. Generally, most previously published ODBMS performance work focused on engineering applications and very little known about the suitability of ODBMS implementations for other application domains. In this paper, we redress this imbalance and evaluate three commercial products (two pure ODBMSs and one hybrid Object-Relational DBMS) to determine the suitability of each for six different application domains. Our results show statistically significant performance differences between the products under test. Furthermore, the hybrid product consistently performed badly on most of our tests. We also found that testing the scalability of products in terms of database size, as well as the choice of language interface, can be very important. Furthermore, the use of a dedicated database load utility can save considerable time when loading simple data, but generating complex data for the load utility requires considerable manual intervention. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.