Improving maintainability by unifying the object and relational models

Object-oriented approach has become the most popular application development technique. In most of the cases, these object-oriented applications use relational databases to meet their needs for persistent storage. However, the ways in which object-oriented and relational paradigms represent information are quite different from each other. These differences result in two different models for representing the same information, thus increasing the design and maintenance efforts. Several attempts have been made to overcome this mismatch of object and relational paradigms, but no such technique has been able to provide satisfactory results. This paper outlines a fundamentally new approach, which overcomes this mismatch through the unification of object and relational models. This methodology not only simplifies the task of object persistence and population but also facilitates the maintenance of the application.