Exxon - Object Oriented Databases vs Relational Databases
Object Oriented Database vs Relational Database
Exxon
(Configuration and FEA)
Exxon, a leading energy company, has deployed a system for managing configurations of drilling rigs and other assets, as well as analyzing such systems using the technique of Finite Element Analysis (FEA). This requires very large numbers of fine grained objects, and sophisticated calculations, modeling stress, heat flow, etc., that traverse and re-traverse these objects as they perform computations. Only an ODBMS can give the support necessary for such analysis. Before ODBMSs, most users had to build proprietary, flat-file systems. Now that ODBMSs can provide the performance needed and the integration with the host language that allows the programmer to simply use the language he knows (such as C++ or Java), these developers can concentrate on their application, while they transparently gain the benefit of scalability, integrity, etc.
Exxon deployed their first generation system some years ago, and is now developing their second generation. Their reasons for choosing the ODBMS over (O)RDBMS include:
Performance: The analysis operation is very navigational in nature, i.e. navigating from a particular node of a model to its element pieces, often in an iterative fashion. This makes database performance key to building a practical system that can perform its function in a timely manner.
Flexibility: The numerical intensive analysis operations being performed required varying-sized arrays of numerical information to be stored with each object. This fact precluded the use of a relational database, and made the flexibility of how the object database could model such information easily an important factor.
Robustness: Objectivity's architecture proved to provide the most robust storage capacity that could meet their application requirements. The caching approach provides high performance without sacrificing data integrity.
Heterogeneity: Transparent support for multiple platforms was another distinguishing factor of Objectivity. Exxon's deployment environment includes SGI and NT machines, and transparent interoperable support for these platforms reduced Exxon's development effort and risk on the project. Others were unable to support mixed use of heterogeneous platforms.
