A performance comparison of object and relational databases using the Sun Benchmark

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Abstract
A general concern about object-oriented systems has been whether or not they are able to meet the performance demands required to be useful for the development of significant production software systems. Attempts to evaluate this assertion have been hampered by a lack of meaningful performance benchmarks that compare database operations across different kinds of databases.In this paper, we utilize the Sun Benchmark [Rube87] as a means for assessing the performance of an object database and comparing it with existing relational systems. We discuss the benchmark, and many of the implementation issues involved in introducing a relationally oriented benchmark into an object-oriented paradigm. We demonstrate the performance of an object database using Ontologic's Vbase object database platform as an example of a commercially available object database, and we compare these benchmark results against those of existing relational database systems. The results offer strong evidence that object databases are capable of performing as well as, or better than, existing relational database systems.