Chapter 8 Object Oriented Databases and Object Persistence
The Object-Oriented (OO) paradigm was first introduced by programming languages such as C++, Eiffel, and Smalltalk. Due to its expressive modeling power and formal semantics, the principles of OO have also been widely used in software development methodologies. However, for data storage and management, the adoption of OO proved less straightforward. In this chapter, we discuss various approaches for object persistence. First, we refresh the basic concepts of OO, many of which have been covered in Chapter 3. This will be followed by a discussion of advanced OO concepts such as method overloading, inheritance, method overriding, polymorphism, and dynamic binding. Next, we review the basic principles of object persistence. We then discuss OODBMSs, which is the core of this chapter. The chapter concludes with evaluating OODBMSs and demonstrating their impact on the emergence of Object Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks, which facilitate the persistence of objects into RDBMSs. Due to its popularity and ease of use, we use Java as the OO language for the examples.
