onal system is much more awkward.•The maintenance of the database is much easier due to the schema evolution facilities and the modular design allowed by the object-oriented model.•The identity concept that gives one internal pointer to each object throughout its life protects the consistency of the database and helps modeling similar real world entities. In the relational systems, this identification number was inevitably user provided.•The database is not only used for storing data but also pieces of code (methods) that run on the data. Consequently, a whole application can be stored and executed with the help of the OODBMS that also supports its maintenance.•The inheritance concept makes code easily reusable.•The expensive join operations of the relational systems have been substituted by the composite object notion, which combined with the clustering mechanism can improve the performance of the composite object retrieval.There are many applications that have been using the relational systems very successfully now for many years and they do not need to change. However, there are a couple of other applications especially in the engineering fields that don't do much with relational systems, mainly from the modeling aspect. For these kinds of applications, the object-oriented approach seems quite appropriate in spite of the problems that still have to be solved.Works CitedBrown, A.W. Object-Oriented Databases: Applications in Software Engineering. McGraw-Hill, 1991.Burleson, D.K. Practical Application of Object-Oriented Techniques to Relational Databases. Wiley/QED, 1994.Chorafas, D.N. and H. Steinmann. Object-Oriented Databases. Prentice-Hall, 1993.Delobel, C., C. Lecluse, and P. Richard. Databases: From Relational to Object-Oriented Systems. ITP, 1995.Gray, P.M.D., K.G. Kulkarni, and N.W. Paton. Object-Oriented Databases: A Semantic Data Model Approach. Prentice-Hall, 1992.Hughes, J.G. O...
