Object-Orientation FAQ

ORION was a prototype OODBMS developed at MCC, an American consortium by Won
Kim and his group.  Won Kim has left MCC and formed a new company, UniSQL, in
Austin, with a new product of the same name.

See also entry under "ITASCA".

REFERENCES:

I have found nearly a dozen papers published by the ORION folks.
Overviews at various stages in its development and commercialization
can be found in:

[KBGW91] Won Kim, N. Ballou, J.F. Garza, and D.; Woelk. A
         distributed object-oriented database system supporting
         shared and private databases. ACM Transactions on
         Information Systems, 9(1):31--51, January 1991.

[KGBW90] W. Kim, J.F. Garza, N. Ballou, and D. Woelk.
         Architecture of the orion next-generation database
         system. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data
         Engineering, 2(1):109--24, March 1990.

[KBCG89] Won Kim, Nat Ballou, Hong-Tai Chou, and Darrell Garza,
         Jorge F. Woelk. Features of the ORION object-oriented
         database system. In Won. Kim and Frederick H.
         Lochovsky, editors, Object-Oriented Concepts, Databases
         and Applications, chapter 11. Addison-Wesley, Reading,
         MA, 1989.

[KBC+88] Won Kim, N. Ballou, Hong-Tai Chou, J.F. Garza,
         D. Woelk, and J. Banerjee. Integrating an
         object-oriented programming system with a database
         system. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on
         Objected-Oriented Programming:  Systems, Languages and
         Applications (OOPSLA), pages 142--152, San Diego, CA,
         September 1988. Published as ACM SIGPLAN Notices
         23(11).
         [Pointers to the previous papers documenting each of the
          advanced features listed above are cited therein.]

The paper most relevant to the issue of schema evolution is the
following:

[BKKK87] J. Banerjee, W. Kim, H-J. Kim, and H.F. Korth.
         Semantics and implementation of schema evolution in
         object-oriented databases. In U. Dayal and I. Traiger,
         editors, Proceedings of the SIGMOD International
         Conference on Management of Data, San Francisco, CA,
         May 1987.

You might also like to look at Kim's book, which provides a good
introduction to OODBMS, while focusing on the ORION work:

[Kim90]  Won Kim. Introduction to Object-Oriented Databases.
         Computer Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990.