Object Design Inc, Burlington, Massachusetts, is expected to announce two database tools in the fourth quarter. This will be the first fruits of the company’s joint development alliance with IBM Corp. First up is a bidirectional object to relational communications tool, called DB Connect. Object Design says that name might change on release. DB Connect will enable ObjectStore, the company’s object-oriented database, to interoperate with relational database management systems using schema mapping. According to the firm, this translates C++ object data schema into relational schema and vice versa. Object Design will add SmallTalk support next year. DB Connect will be available initially for DB2 with support for Oracle and Sybase to follow. The second tool, Performance Expert, is a graphical performance monitoring tool for ObjectStore. The product, which was co-developed with IBM Deutschland’s software labs, has been designed for developers configuring applications and parts of the database for distribution across a client-server environment. In concert with these two announcements, Object Design is also preparing version 4 of ObjectStore, which will include improved performance and enhancements, such as multiple readers and writers. IBM has a 20% stake in Object Design, which it acquired back in 1992 and uses ObjectStore as the reference system for internal software development. Meanwhile, two other Object Design investors AT&T Corp and Intel Corp are also using ObjectStore. Intel is developing manufacturing applications for internal use, AT&T has projects on the go.
