Bringing it all home: Choosing an ODBMS vendor

So you think your company might benefit from an object-oriented database management system.

You've looked at the company's long-term goals and the current means for achieving them. Maybe your company's complex data is managed by a relational database or a flat file system, but you think it could be handled better, faster and more efficiently with objects. How do you proceed?

First, your company must establish a clear vision of its business goals and strategies. In addition, you need to strengthen management support and get buy-in from upstream and downstream application development teams to prevent political jockeying from interfering with successful deployment.

It's helpful to be able to successfully "sell" what objects can do for the company, as well as what they won't do (see page 100). Some companies will do this critical planning for themselves before vendor requests for proposals. Other companies see advantages in collaborating with the vendor while studying how the product will work in their particular processing environment.

Second, look for an object database management system (ODBMS) that meets your needs. Again, it will be much easier to find the right ODBMS if your company does some planning and needs assessment up front. It will allow for more efficient product benchmarking and testing in your environment, and the information you receive from the tests will be more relevant.

Third, consider a comprehensive evaluation that factors in the relationships between leading object analysis, design, programming and repository technology.

Finally, look for a vendor that specializes in bringing object technology into your business successfully, practically and economically. Your goal should be to find a vendor that has a clear vision for its products and services, as well as a leadership position in the deployment of mission-critical solutions.

Strength and Longevity One key element of any software decision-assessing the vendor itself-often has less to do with technology than with human elements. Because database software requires training, support, ongoing maintenance and enhancement, choosing the right vendor is particularly important in the ODBMS marketplace. To ensure long-term success, consider a vendor that has a keen focus on your industry, as well as an established track record. The situation was similar at the beginning of the relational database management system (RDBMS) era 10 years ago.

Many vendors offered many products: pure RDBMSs, structured query language (SQL) front-ends for network DBMSs, extended network DBMSs and others. Today, only three major independent RDBMS suppliers remain, and all three are vendors of pure RDBMSs. Just as the extended network database approach did not meet the requirements of the relational database market, the extended relational database will not meet the needs of the object database market.

Step-by-Step One of the biggest fears companies have when considering the move to a new technology is that legacy systems will have to be dumped, thus jeopardizing the substantial investment already made in equipment, software, training and staff. A good ODBMS vendor will provide ways for old and new systems to interoperate, securing a company's investment in its existing equipment. In other words, the vendor will find ways to deploy an ODBMS incrementally.

Incremental implementation not only preserves legacy systems, it also allows your company to choose the most appropriate database technology for any given application-ODBMS for some, RDBMS for others.

The right ODBMS is one that can be supported by a full suite of tools for the development, management and integration of applications within an organization's overall computing environment. The product should provide integration capability between the ODBMS and existing tools and legacy databases. It should also provide standard SQL access to data stored in the object database.

The ODBMS should allow a user to perform a heterogeneous "join" across SQL and non-SQL databases. For example, a user could set up a join between the customer data stored in an RDBMS and call detail records stored in an ODBMS. The query could return a billing record that could be sent to and processed by yet another application.

Even more powerful is an object storage environment that encourages multiple language interfaces-enabling shared access to the same objects-such as Smalltalk, C++ and Java.

Don't Do It Alone When you're evaluating an object database vendor, look for a company that offers a comprehensive family of support services to assist you and your team throughout the application development life cycle-from concept through implementation.

You'll want prompt access to technical staff to answer your questions while developing ODBMS applications. You should look for services such as technical support hotlines, which are staffed by ODBMS specialists who can answer technical questions, locate information in the documentation and accept software problem reports and enhancement requests.

The vendor should offer regular software and documentation updates and urgent problem resolution. If a regular update does not match your urgent business requirements, the company should attempt to create and deliver a special patch.

The ODBMS vendor should also offer fee-based priority support services, including full-time support, two-hour callback for an escalated response and a dedicated support engineer who understands the particulars of your applications and computing environments. In addition to technical support, a solid ODBMS vendor will provide training that focuses on building the skills your organization needs to implement object technology most effectively.

The training should include developing a conceptual understanding of the ODBMS and its architecture along with the specific techniques and design strategies used to build applications. The instructors should have practical experience, and they should be available to come to your site.

If you're developing your own ODBMS applications, you may wish to use consulting services, which can complement your own resources. Your vendor should help solve the specific challenges facing your development team while transferring the technical knowledge and skills that are so critical in the object environment.

Look for evaluation services that include gathering both business and technical requirements, benchmark design and prototype development before actual development work. These services ensure that your team matches their expectations to the proposed technological solution. Many of the critical factors in developing and deploying ODBMS applications revolve around project-level issues.

Your vendor should help your team in areas such as object-oriented development planning, prototype development and scheduling, high-level object-oriented analysis and design planning, and test planning.

Third-Party Tools Experienced developers recognize that more than one specific development technology is often required for a comprehensive, production-quality telephony deployment. This is particularly true of object-oriented applications, in which many tools vie for position in the analysis, design and programming phases of the life cycle.

Strong ODBMS providers will offer open and effective third-party programs like those that have attracted a strong following of vendors representing leading market share in areas such as object request broker technology, inference engines for telephony alarm filtering and correlation, GUI tools and configuration management products. What all these vendors share is a commitment to open systems and true interoperability with the market leader in deployed object-oriented database systems.

Aside from vendors' attributes, one other feature of ODBMSs could make or break your decision: around-the-clock availability. For many organizations, it is not enough to be reliable; guarantees and backup systems are required to ensure superior quality-of-service levels. Your vendor should offer several ways to provide this coverage, such as Versant's Fault Tolerant Server, a transparent facility that automatically switches to another database server in the event of any system failure (failures within the database, operating system, hardware or network).

Also, your vendor should offer on-line schema evolution that guarantees the following capabilities: automatic display of schematic changes in the database; on-line database management, in which all utilities execute on-line without the need to stop and restart the database; and dynamic space reclamation when objects are deleted.

Benchmark Considerations Companies often like to use external benchmarks to judge the soundness and performance of a product. The only industry-standard benchmark for ODBMSs-Cattell, published by Rick Cattell of SunSoft-measures single-user performance on a mix of operations on complex, computer-aided design data.

The most important observation to note from the Cattell benchmark is that ODBMSs are much faster than RDBMSs for the management of complex data. The Cattell benchmark is less useful for comparing ODBMSs because each ODBMS wins at least one of the various tests, and thus all ODBMS vendors have claimed victory on this benchmark.

Users should be wary of Cattell benchmark performance claims and examine the individual test to determine their relevance to the target application. Perhaps a more comprehensive, competitive evaluation is the University of Wisconsin "007" benchmark, which compares vendors' databases on a broad range of query and transaction characteristics, with more than 125 tests.

Of course, the best code to benchmark is the target application. The next best benchmark is one that resembles the target application. Benchmarks that do not resemble the target application are worse than no benchmark at all, and industry standard benchmarks are only relevant to the extent that they reflect the target application.

Telecommunications service providers and equipment vendors are confronting significant challenges as they address the multitude of changes sweeping their industry. As the competition intensifies, service providers must react to changes quickly and effectively while maintaining the highest levels of performance and reliability.

Object-oriented databases offer one of the best ways to meet these challenges. After all, isn't success the object?

Barry Wetmore is Director of Telecommunications for Versant Object Technology, Menlo Park, Calif.