Nousoft - Object Oriented Databases vs Relational Databases
Object Oriented Database vs Relational Database
Nousoft
(Library Document Management, Web)
Nousoft, Monterey, CA, was founded in 1993 by the developer of the leading installed base (300) library management system with the goal to bring a new generation of capabilities. Its systems support universities and other large libraries for interactive, electronic access to documents, automatic accounting of copyright fees, and easy access dynamically from the World Wide Web. It supports MARC (the library standard), SGML, and HTML, with databases in use up to 10s of GB, up to 100s of users. It's built on Objectivity/DB.
The Nousoft system supports 70 inter-object relationships. This has never been successfully accomplished in RDBMSs, but is straightforward and fast in the ODBMS. A typical installation has 14M transactions/yr, with 17 branches, and subsecond (complex, WAN) transactions. Another ODBMS payoff is due to caching in the client. An 8.5x11" image, 1-bit b&w is delivered to the user in under 1 sec. Even for 16b (256 colors), less than 4 sec is required, which is several times better than any other system. Users couldn't believe it was real. There is no degradation at all for multiple users…except when they happen to simultaneously request the very same image (not likely), in which case, time roughly doubles.
The same implementers built the new system in 1/4 the time of the old. Although the implementers had the benefit of experience, they also implemented significantly more functionality, and credited the 1/4 savings to object technology and the ODBMS. The old system implementation required 3 people x 18 mo to get DB to handle the basic MARC record. The new system required 2 people x 4.5 mo, with about twice as much functionality.
