Object-Oriented Databases And Their Advantages

An object-oriented database is a type of database system that deals with the modeling and creation of data as objects. The main advantage of this database is the consistency it provides to the programmers.

Object Oriented Databases:

These Object Oriented databases are managed by Object Oriented Database management Systems (OODBMS) and also with relational databases.

As we are learning about Object Oriented Databases, we should know some terminology like,

Objects: Objects are basically an instance of the class and are used in the building blocks.

Classes: Classes are the templates or blueprint of an object, which defines the behavior of objects.

Methods: Methods are those which determine the behavior of a class.

Pointers: Pointers help establish relationships and help access the elements.

Object Oriented Programming principles include Data Abstraction, Polymorphism, Encapsulation, and Inheritance.

• Data Abstraction speaks about hiding the internal data from the users. So that, our data will be safe and data that is required can be shown to outsiders.
• Polymorphism speaks about the ability of an object can act in multiple forms.
• Encapsulation speaks about grouping data into a single object. By that, we get more security and access protection.
• Inheritance speaks When a class derives from or acquires another class.

Characteristics of Object Oriented databases:

• Object-oriented databases provide system-generated object identifiers and can be identified easily.
• Object Oriented databases provide the encapsulation, data representation and methods implemented are hidden.
• Object Oriented databases are extensible and identify new data types and operations performed on them.
• Object Oriented databases also provide inheritance properties in which an object inherits the other objects.
• Object Oriented databases have a direct relationship between the real world and databases.

Examples and also called features of Object-oriented databases:

• Query Languages (this is the language that is used for finding data from the database)

• Recovery (when we lose any data it helps us to recover it)

• ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability)

• Transparent Persistence (used in object-oriented databases for data manipulation)

• Database Caching (Data Caching gives access to a database from program memory instead of a disk)

Let us know some popular object-oriented databases,

• Cache

• ConceptBase

• Db4o

• ObjectDB object database

• ObjectDatabase++

• Objectivity

• ObjectStore

• Versant object database

• WakandaDB

• Object-relational database

• GemStone/S

Now let us discuss the advantages and disadvantages of object-oriented databases:

Benefits of Object Oriented Databases :

1. Expressive Query language
2. Support for schema evolution
3. Database Caching
4. Extensibility
5. Enriched modeling capabilities.

Let us know something more in detail about the advantages of object-oriented databases,

• Object-oriented models allow real-world data to be modeled more closely.
• Reusability makes our data faster and maintenance is also easy.
• Object-oriented database mama systems have significant performance improvements over relational database management systems.
• Data can be handled very easily and can save easily and retrieve data quickly.
• Very Extensible with customized data.
• Schema evolution is more feasible.
• It is applicable to advanced database applications.
• Complex data also can be handled very easily.
• This works for object-oriented programming languages.
• Object-oriented databases provide persistence to objects
• Here data can be stored in the form of rows and columns and read the data.
• MongoDB offers object-oriented databases.
• As we discussed earlier, object-oriented databases are used with object-oriented programming languages like swift, JS, Java,  Kotlin, and many more…
• When we use object-oriented programming languages the code we write is simpler.

Disadvantages of Object Oriented Databases :

1. Competition
2. Complexity
3. Lack of support for views
4. Lack of support for security
5. Lack of standards
6. Lack of experience
7. Lack of universal data model
8. Query Optimization compromises encapsulation

Now let us know more about these,

• We don't have any standard object-oriented query language.
• Query optimizations are required here.
• Many object-oriented database management systems use locking for concurrency control protocol.
• Complexity makes data difficult to read and more expensive.
• Object-oriented databases don't provide any view mechanisms but provide many advantages like data independence, security, and customization.
• Object-oriented databases don't provide any adequate security mechanisms.
• The user will not have access to individual classes or objects.
• Object-oriented databases are different and more challenging to learn for non-programmers.

You can also learn about functional dependencies in DBMS by Scaler Topics.

Conclusion:

1. Firstly, We discussed the basic definition of object-oriented databases.
2. An object-oriented database is a type of database system that deals with the modeling and creation of data as objects.
3. Later, we discussed object-oriented databases and their examples, features like following ACID properties, recovery, query language, transparent persistence, and database caching.
4. Then we know the popular Object-Oriented Database Management Systems.
5. Then we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of object-oriented databases.
6. In brief, some advantages are extensibility, Expressive, Supportive, database caching, and Enriched modeling capabilities.
7. In brief, some disadvantages are Competition, Complexity, Lack of support for views,  security, Lack of standards, Lack of experience, and Lack of a universal data model.
8. We also discussed some characteristics of object-oriented databases.
9. We learned about each of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Object-oriented Database Management Systems in brief.