History
Object-relational database management systems grew out of research that occurred in the early 1990s. That research extended existing relational database concepts by adding object concepts. The researchers aimed to retain a declarative query-language based on predicate calculus as a central component of the architecture. Probably the most notable research project, Postgres (UC Berkeley), spawned two products tracing their lineage to that research: Illustra and PostgreSQL.
In the mid-1990s, early commercial products appeared. These included Illustra (Illustra Information Systems, acquired by Informix Software which was in turn acquired by IBM), Omniscience (Omniscience Corporation, acquired by Oracle Corporation and became the original Oracle Lite), and UniSQL (UniSQL, Inc., acquired by KCOMS). Ukrainian developer Ruslan Zasukhin, founder of Paradigma Software, Inc., developed and shipped the first version of Valentina database in the mid-1990s as a C++ SDK. By the next decade, PostgreSQL had become a commercially viable database and is the basis for several products today which maintain its ORDBMS features.
Computer scientists came to refer to these products as "object-relational database management systems" or ORDBMSs.
Many of the ideas of early object-relational database efforts have largely become incorporated into SQL:1999 via structured types. In fact, any product that adheres to the object-oriented aspects of SQL:1999 could be described as an object-relational database management product. For example, IBM's DB2, Oracle database, and Microsoft SQL Server, make claims to support this technology and do so with varying degrees of success.
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