News Analysis: DB exposes divisions of database doyennes

There were flowers at the San Francisco event, but the atmosphere was far from one of peace and love

The latest phase in the object-relational war broke out on the second day of last week?s DB Expo trade show, held in San Francisco, as industry luminaries resorted to name calling.

The database industry is going through some interesting times. With financial problems at both Sybase and Informix and Microsoft wanting to be perceived as the dominant player instead of database giant Oracle, the balance of power could well shift. So the DB Expo show no doubt came at a timely juncture.

In a debate about ?The Database: 30 Years On?, four senior executives from Informix, Microsoft, IBM and Sybase began by discussing the progress of the database industry since the 1960s on a stage bedecked with lurid dayglo flower power illustrations, with a moving blow-up of a lava lamp as a backdrop.

But put four industry giants in one room and you are asking for trouble; before long the conversation shifted to arguments about which data model was best.

Jim Gray, senior researcher at Microsoft, argued that the purely object-oriented database industry had failed to materialise and relational vendors were not responding quickly enough to the opportunities this presented.

?Object-oriented databases are a flop,? he claimed. ?It?s a zero billion dollar industry. But the evolution of the relational database to handle new data types is not quick enough. Most of the objects being created today are not being created in object-relational databases.?

He added that the term ?object-relational? was a loose one, and every one of the panellists could claim they had such a product. Such an accusation understandably bought a response from the other database vendors. Informix chief technology officer Michael Stonebraker, said: ?Gimme a break. Microsoft is not object-relational. That?s like Dan Quayle trying to be Kennedy!?

His comments were met with both cheers and boos from the audience.

Gray took his revenge with a thinly veiled criticism of Informix? self-confessed over-emphasis on headline grabbing object-relational technology, which contributed to its $140 million loss last quarter. ?There are people who want to be cool and people who want to solve problems,? he said. ?Sometimes they are the same.?

Stonebraker turned the debate towards ease of use. ?Database use should be as simple as a child?s game,? he said, pointing to a game that his own five-year-old daughter plays, which has a help and support system that she can understand. ?We need that kind of system. We?ve made software that?s incredibly hard to use.?

Bob Epstein, executive vice president and co-founder at Sybase, picked up on the point with an all-too-familiar cliche about computers and telephones. ?The target is the telephone,? he said. ?The telephone system does an excellent job at keeping the complexity out of the way of the user. I can see the same trends in computing.?

IBM fellow Bruce Lindsay pointed out the number of broken promises and undelivered technology in the database industry.

Oracle, which was scheduled to be the fifth panellist, was represented on stage by an empty chair ? the vendor did not exhibit at the show, arguing that it already goes to the biggest database show ? its own Open World.

Also absent from the debate was Computer Associates (CA), which, given the drubbing dealt to COO Sanjay Kumar at DB Expo in December 1996, was possibly just as well.

On that occasion Kumar was criticised for arguing the case for the traditional relational model, while other companies on stage were jumping on the object-relational bandwagon. But CA has not changed its view, said the firm?s research and development manager, John Ainsworth, who insisted that its Ingres product will remain a relational offering.

?The object-relational market has peaked early, but has yet to be proven,? he said. ?Informix got off to a fast start, but that?s stumbled. Oracle 8 was originally going to be object- oriented, but it seems to have scaled back on what it means by object-oriented.?

CA?s strategy will be to offer two distinct products ? CA-Open Ingres and a pure object oriented database, known as Jasmine. Ainsworth?s argument is that Ingres will provide the relational components of Jas-mine, meaning that it is entirely possible that CA customers will be running both products in the future.

Ainsworth dismissed suggestions that CA?s emphasis was now focused on Jasmine and that Ingres would become a maintenance-only product. Release 2 of CA-Open Ingres is now in beta with general availability scheduled for next month. The next full release will follow about 18 months to two years later, with at least two point upgrades in between.

The full releases will see changes of an architectural nature as CA adds elements that were neglected during The ASK Group?s ill-fated ownership of Ingres in the early 1990s. Ainsworth points to the introduction of row level locking as one such project.

The debate ended melodramatically when panel chairman Herb Edelstein, an analyst at Two Crows consultancy, smashed an old PC with a shriek of ?relational is dead; long live object-relational.? But Ainsworth was more reserved. ?It?s very much a wait and see time,? he concluded.