Re: FromNess, ToNess

[Joel Voelz -- "Marketing-in-a-Drum" <joel>]

Actually, Dean's message started me thinking of some questions that were
raised this last week when I saw the presentations for some Object Oriented
Databases at the PC Forum. These are just off the top of my head, and I will
have more, but I welcome input to assist me in thinking through the position-
ing of Xanadu viv-a-vis these products. The global questions are:

1. What features/abilities of a COMPLETE DBMS system does Xanadu either lack
or is not expected to be efficient at?
	- This means things like doing sorts, associative retrieval, etc

2. How does Xanadu compare to a general purpose Object Oriented database?
	- Are our "Documents" general purpose "Objects"?
	- Do we support tagging "object" (or documents in our universe)
	  with attributes?
	- Do/can we support "encapsulation" where you can store with an 
	  object all its attributes and operations?
	- Do/can we support inheritance? (This could especially immportant
	  in areas like CASE)

3. If in fact we can support "general purpose" object oriented database 
application development, then the terms we are using are squeezing us into 
a perceived niche. By using the term "Documents" if in fact they can be
used as data objects, we may be positioning ourselves away from a broad class
of applications in developers/users minds. All of the terms we use tend to 
focus the system on "Document-type" applications. The impression I got from
developers/users at the PC Forum is that many people don't consider their
applications document-oriented applications (except maybe the Electronic
publishing people). 

4. Bottom line:
	A. Just how general-purpose is Xanadu vis-a-vis traditional DBMS &
	   Object Oriented databases?
	B. If it is not already "oriented" this way, are the underpinnings
	   in place to make it very close to a general purpose OODB?

Joel