ABSTRACT
There are so many: SQL, OSQL, OQL, SAG, RDA, ODBC, OMG, ODMG, and the list goes on. What are they? What do they do for you? Users of ODBMSs desire< standards for two reasons: portability, to allow them to move an application from one ODBMS vendor to another; and interoperability, to allow them to share information across vendors. In the RDBMS world, SQL has provided a measure of portability, and, more recently, SQL Access Group and ODBC have added some interoperability. In the ODBMS world, the recently-released ODMG-93 addresses portability, at the level of Object Definition (ODL), Query (OQL), C++ Binding, and Smalltalk binding, for the basic operations of object definition, creation, access, and sharing. Other features, such as versioning, long transactions, and dynamic type modification are planned for the future. Interoperability can be approached via CORBA, via direct mechanisms, and via the same ODBC.