by John West, for HPCwire

Object database maker Versant has done pretty well in its market niche, with a list of 1,500 customers that includes well-known names like AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, and British Airways. With 80 people, a market cap of $65 million USD, and revenue last year of $25 million, Versant is a small company by most any measure. But it is in a small industry: while the relational database business is valued around $10 billion a year these days, the object database market is on the order of only a couple hundred million dollars a year.

A niche product for a niche market, Versant's core technology isn't needed everywhere, but it is indispensable where it is needed. And the company is hoping to demonstrate that at least some HPC users need it.

Alright, first things first: what's an object database? Object databases provide persistent storage for, well, objects. Imagine you have a backpack object, and that backpack has a flashlight object and a rope object in it. When you retrieve the backpack object out of the database you get the flashlight and the rope along with it, no extra queries required (well, actually you probably get pointers to those objects, but that's a detail).

With a relational database, data is stored in rows and columns in (probably many) tables in your database. In our backpack example all backpacks may be listed in a specific table, with each given a unique ID. Another table may store the various camp tools, like ropes and flashlights, that campers may put in backpacks. And yet a third table would put these together, with one row holding the ID for our backpack and the flashlight, and another row holding the ID for our backpack again and the rope.

The mechanics of retrieval offer an important distinction with the relational model: unlike a relational database wherein programmers have to structure a database request (query) in a separate language called SQL, an object database works in the context of a regular programming language such as C++, C or Java. So, for the object database, a programmer calls the backpack object into memory and it comes along with (pointers to) the flashlight and rope objects. But a programmer using a relational database would constructuct a SQL query that first pulled all of the records from the third table to find all the entries that are associated with our backpack's ID. Then he'd have to construct other queries to look in the camp tool tables to find out what kinds of tools were attached to those IDs ...

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