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According to wikipedia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORDBMS
IBM’s DB2, Oracle database, and
Microsoft SQL Server, make claims to
support this technology and do so with
varying degrees of success
So, are these products true “ORDBMS” like PostgreSQL? Or are they a long way from it? Can someone please point me to any link where I can read about the features still to be implemented by these RDBMS to become true ORDBMS!
Oracle re-branded itself as an ORDBMS with the release of 8.0, which was the version when TYPEs arrived. However it wasn’t a very complete object implementation. There was no inheritance in the first release and it took until 9iR2 – three major releases later – to get user-defined constructors. Even now, with 11g out, encapsulation is not entirely supported: TYPEs cannot have private variables or methods.
It transpired that very few existing Oracle customers cared much about objects and very few OO programmers were interested in databases. Plus there was a new Next Big Thing: the internet. So when version 8.1 was released Oracle reverted to being a plain RDBMS, albeit an internet-enabled one. Hence the 8i tag (i.e. it had Java Stored Procedures).
To those of us brought up on SQL the object implementation is a bit clunky and doesn’t offer much with regards to storage. However, TYPEs have been a major addition to the PL/SQL armoury, particularly collections and bulk processing. Inheritance and polymorphism can be useful in some niche scenarios. I presented on this topic at the UKOUG annual conference a few years ago. Find out more.
Edit
Oracle still includes all its ORDBMS features in every edition of the database. They are pretty comprehensive (except for that lack of private variables and methods). I don’t know how it compares to PostgreSQL. Oracle’s OR features are covered in Oracle’s online documentation, which you can read here.