Major Features of Object Relational DBMS (ORDBMS)

List the major features of ORDBMS / What are the important features of ORDBMS? / Apart from features of RDBMS, what are the other Object oriented features supported by ORDBMS?

Major Features of ORDBMS

• User-defined abstract data types (ADTs) - ADTs allow new data types with structures suited to particular applications to be defined.

• User-defined routines – these provide the means for writing customized server functions that have much of the power and functionality expressible in C.

• Inheritance - inheritance of user defined types is supported to derive new sub-types or sub-classes which would therefore inherit all attributes and methods from the parent type.

• Encapsulation - encapsulation is a language mechanism for restricting access to some of the object's components.

• Complex objects including first normal form objects.

• Object Identity – OIDs are used to identify objects.

• Large objects support - these are disk-based objects that have the functionality of random access files. ADTs use them to store any data that does not fit into a table row.

• Extensible and flexible indexing - R-tree or Generalized Search Tree (GiST) indexing for multi-dimensional data enables fast searching of particular ADTs in a table.