Relational Vs. an Object Oriented Database

Object-oriented databases are not as popular as relational databases, but are more powerful.

Object-oriented databases were invented in the 1980s as data types became more complex and object-oriented programming languages became the standard. While they have gained a loyal following in the open-source software community, object-oriented databases are not as popular as relational databases.

Relational Databases

A relational database management system (RDBMS) is for relational databases. In a relational database, a set of data tables represents entities related together by primary and foreign keys. The relationship types can be one-to-one (1:1), one-to-many (1:M) or many-to-many (M:M). For example one data entity may be "Customer" related 1:M to "Orders," because a given customer can have more than one order.

Object-oriented Databases

Object-oriented database management systems (ODBMS) were created to deal with increasingly complex data types and object-oriented languages such as C++. At the time, many experts believed they would quickly replace relational databases, however they are now considered a complement to RDBMS. The biggest use of ODBMS is in the open-source software community.

Selecting a Database Type

RDBMS is still the most dominant database type on the market today. Most packaged enterprise business applications are built on relational models. For those who do need ODBMS support, most relational databases now support both complex data types and object-oriented programming languages. Also, because there are few standards in the ODBMS software community, incompatibility issues are much more likely.

References

• ODBMS.ORG: Introduction to ODBMS