To a man with an ORDBMS everything looks like a row in a table

In large software projects it is required to manage all project-related artefacts in a shared database in order to support cooperation of developers and reuse of design. Unfortunately, such projects have to be supported by various development tools using proprietary strategies for storing their persistent data. Since we need a strong query language to analyse the project-related data we choose an object-relational database system (ORDBMS) as an integration platform. We discuss the possibilities of how to integrate external data in an ORDBMS. Further, we introduce a reference architecture for discussing the architectural options of an ORDBMS-based integration environment. Finally, we present our own system.