The construction of Object-Oriented Database Management Systems started in the middle 80’s, at a prototype building level, and at the beginning of the 90’s the first commercial systems appeared. The interest for the development of such systems stems from the need to cover the modeling deficiencies of their predecessors, that is the relational database management systems. They were intended to be used by applications that have to handle big and complex data such as Computer Aided Engineering, Computer Aided Design, and Office Information Systems.

The area of the OODBMSs is characterized by three things. First, it lacks a common data model. There is no common data model although many proposals can be found in the literature. This is a more general problem of all the object-oriented systems not only the database management systems. Since the data model determines the database language of the system, which in turn determines the implementation of the system, we can understand that the differences between the various systems with different data models can be big and substantial. Second is the common theoretical framework. Although there is no standard object-oriented model, most object-

Some topics in this essay:
Systems OODBMSs, Lisp Smalltalk, RDBMSs DBMS, Common Lisp, Management Systems, composite objects, database management, object-oriented databases, Databases Prentice-Hall, Object-Oriented Databases, relational systems, object-oriented model, real world, subclass class, database language, data model, multiple inheritance, class subclass class, database management systems, inheritance class subclass, Approach Prentice-Hall, Engineering McGraw-Hill, Essentials Addison-Wesley, real world objects, object-oriented database management,