OODBs?

James Foster Smalltalk at jgfoster.net
Thu Jun 7 01:51:42 UTC 2007


On Wednesday 06 June 2007 2:31 pm, Blake wrote:
> I have a question for anyone who has worked on the internals of a OODB. To  
> wit:
> 
> Is the underlying data in an OODB typically stored in relational tables?
> 
> If, for example, you had a "person" object, and then subclasses of  
> "employee" and "customer", would there be three tables with the common  
> info in "person" joined to "employee" and "customer" respectively?

In GemStone/S, the objects are stored as objects in the image. The image can 
be terabytes in size, mind you, but they are just objects in the image. The 
internal representation is somewhat like in a client Smalltalk, there is a 
chunk of memory with an object header that includes information like the 
class. The garbage collector is responsible for moving things around to 
compact space when an object is no longer referenced.



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