ObjectStore

Article summary

ObjectStore is a commercial object database, a specialized type of NoSQL database designed to handle data created by applications that use object-oriented programming techniques, avoiding the object–relational mapping overhead required when using object-oriented data with a relational database. It is inspired by the Statice database originally developed at Symbolics. ObjectStore is innovative in its use of the C++ language to make database access transparent. Objects can be created in a database by overloading the operator new(). In this way, one can create new C++ objects directly in the database yet these persistent objects look and behave just like normal C++ objects. Data is mapped into memory as operating system pages. When data is referenced in a different page, by making use of signals, ObjectStore traps the pointer exception and transparently brings objects in from the database by bringing in the required page(s). In addition, by use of a technique called swizzling, the database can be accessed from different platforms, with pages being 'swizzled' as they are brought into memory on page faults to correct big endian versus little endian platform issues as well as virtual function table layout. The design of ObjectStore is described in a 1991 paper in the Communications of the ACM.…

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