| Rich, This may not be wholly acurate but this is my understanding
of object oriented data bases.
An object oriented data base has knowledge and operators for data
objects beyond the traditional text/character, date and decimal
data types. The capability to define and manipulate user defined
data types such as SSN, phone numbers (things traditionally associated
with the relational concept of DOMAIN) borders on object oriented.
Most discussions I've heard regarding object oriented, however,
center on special storage, retrieval and manipulation of more complex
objects such as images and voice. For example while storing an image
as a series of bits is possible (sometimes forceably), the operators
for manipulation are very restrictive and will only allow insertion
or extraction (therefore only storage management) of the image.
In an object oriented data base, however, special operators could
be defined (either by the user or the vendor) which have knowledge
of an image data type and allow operations such as specifying front,
side, rear, etc... views of the object on retrieval or operators
to rotate the object. This, to my understanding, is the basic premise
of object oriented data bases. The system maintains knowledge beyond
simply data type and size, encompassing operations and
manipulations, on an object by object basis.
More information can probably be found in trade journals which focus
on Artificial Intellegence.
Sandy
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