Peter Baumann

• The discussion between object-oriented and object-relational DBMS technology seems to be decided since some time, in favor of the second candidate. We unroll this question based on our experience with the design and implementation of the array DBMS rasdaman which offers storage and query language retrieval on large, multi-dimensional arrays such as 2-D remote sensing imagery and 4-D atmospheric simulation results. This information category is sufficiently far from both relational tuples and object-oriented pointer networks to achieve a "fair" comparison where no approach has an immediate advantage. The rasdaman system is implemented in a strictly object-oriented manner. We discuss rasdaman on model, interface, and implementation level and contrast our experience with concepts and concrete systems of object-relational technology. To underpin and justify rasdaman design decisions we also present rasdaman performance results. The rasdaman system is in operational use and available in open source, so our results can easily be reproduced.