This small report describes the steps and decisions made in choosing and implementing an object oriented database for the UNIX version of Microcosm. The Introduction explains the reasons for not using the current flat linkbase available. Section 2, lists the options of databases we had and the decision taken. Section 3 gives some basic concepts of Object Oriented Programming and some advantages of it. Section 4, reviews small problems that we had, but that took some time to be sorted out. Section 5, explains the database design, section 6, describes the current development state and the future works to come, and finally section 7 reviews the next generation of Exodus (the database chosen), and some conclusions.
At the time that it was decided to implement a CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) based in the UNIX version of Microcosm, the only link storage available was a flat linkbase without enough flexibility to support all the functionalities expected for a hypermedia system, neither for a CSCW system. As the focus of our work wasn't building up a new database from scratch, we start looking for public domain databases, since the only available database in the department was a very old version of Ingres. The next section reviews the options that we had, and the reasons for our choice.