Connecting Galaxies: Bridging the Gap Between Databases and Applications

An incompatibility of object-oriented application code and relational database engine often causes performance problems, known as Impedance Mismatch, which negatively affect business-critical application functions. The incompatibility can also over-complicate application design and increase the costs of development. We address these issues, applying a concept of the API contracts to the interaction between the application and the database. We introduce a new technique providing for the transfer of complex objects rather than low-level records. We describe the implementation of the proposed solution in industrial settings and show how suggested techniques streamline the application development, at the same time providing significant performance gains.