ORR: object-relational rapprochement

The current fashion in database technology is the eschewing of relational databases in favor of object-oriented databases. C.J. Date and Hugh Darwen (1995) have issued a challenge for the industry to turn away from today's relational database products and to begin to develop and use databases conforming to the formal relational model. To meet the storage requirements of modern data, they propose to extend the notion of domains, and they claim that this expanded notion, when combined with the formal relational model, would be more than sufficient for the vast majority of the applications now being moved to object-oriented databases. This paper makes a brief survey of the relational model, object orientation in programming, and some of the present attempts to combine the two. It then presents ORR, a prototype implementation of a database system that incorporates a version of the expanded notion of domains into a near relational database.