Companies today need to manage mountains of accounting information, and business information, consisting of databased information with complex relationships, design information, text, video, audio, and animation. Traditional relational database systems simply were not designed for this complex set of requirements. At the same time, companies are attempting to create a new generation of powerful multimedia applications that can be deployed to capitalize on emerging trends in electronic commerce.

ICI helps customers by analyzing suitability of OODB's as a solution to an organization's information handling requirements. Many of our staff played key roles in helping develop many of the core object technologies used in OODB's on the market today, and they apply this expertise to determine the best database solution for our customers.

For simple application requirements, such as handling financial transactions that are posted to ledgers, RDB's will remain a superior solution for the forseeable future. But, for application requirements requiring navigation among a complex set of data, OODB's have proven performance advantages of 2 to 3 orders of magnitude over RDB's. So, with these performance characteristics so clearly superior in many cases, OODB's should be considered carefully when deciding on an appropriate, future-proof technology for complex Internet/intranet-based requirements.