ODABA database features

This chapter considers database features available without using the GUI framework and tools provided with the Object Development Environment (ODE).

ODABA provides many enhanced database features on one hand, and, on the other hand, tries to comply to standards as far as possible. Here, standard features and main extensions (differences to other database management systems) are listed.

The theoretical base for ODABA is Unified Database Theory, which defines abstract database model levels for different types of databases. ODABA combines the flexibility of key/value stores (P0) with the simplicity of relational databases (P1), the complexity of object-oriented databases (P2) and analytical features of data warehouse technologies (P3).

Physically, all database entries (instances and indexes) are referenced by a 32 byte entry descriptor, which contains version and schema version information, modification count and data base position.

Limitations for ODABA databases depend on operating system and compiller used. The file size is limited by the operating system. Since ODABA allows splitting the database in a large number of physical files, space for the database is limited only by disk size.

Internally, ODABA supports 64-bit identities (internal database entry number). However, running the 32-bit version of ODABA, number of database entries (per main base) are limited to 2 147 483 647 entries. Running the 64-bit version of ODABA up to 9 223 372 036 854 775 808 database entries are supported per main base. Since an ODABA database may consist of maximum 16 383 main bases, for the moment there is practically no space limit.