ObjectStore

ObjectStore is a commercial object database, which is a specialized type of database designed to handle data created by applications that use object-oriented programming techniques. It is inspired by the Statice database originally developed at Symbolics. ObjectStore is innovative in its use of the C++ language to make database access transparent. Objects can be created in a database by overloading the operator new(). In this way, one can store C++ objects directly in the database and these persistent objects look and behave just like normal C++ objects. By making use of signals, ObjectStore traps pointer exceptions and transparently brings objects in from the database. In addition, by use of a technique called swizzling, the database can be accessed from different platforms, with pages being 'swizzled' as they are brought into memory on page faults to correct big endian versus little endian platform issues as well as virtual function table layout. The design of ObjectStore is described in a 1991 paper in the Communications of the ACM.