Design issues of database access in a CORBA environment

CORBA is an architecture aiming to provide an infrastructure for the cooperation of distributed and heterogeneous software components in a network. One of the most important components of real-life applications are database systems. In this paper we investigate the use of CORBA to access data stored in a database system. We evaluate the design decisions a developer has to take if he wants to use CORBA to make his data accessible for remote clients, grouping them into five different dimensions. We also evaluate the usability of the object Query Service and the Object Transaction Service, as specified by the OMG. This leads to the identification of three different scenarios, each of which uses CORBA in a completely different manner, which we call "Old-Fashioned", "Object Collections", and "Pure CORBA" .