1.1 Introduction

1.1.4 Object-oriented languages and relational databases

The SQL-ODBC library does not provide the means to "objectify" a relational database or an SQL statement. That is, it does not treat a databases or statements in an object-oriented fashion or provide support for doing so.

This is because the object-oriented programming model is very different from the relational database model. The two most significant differences follow.

First, the relational database model has only simple datatypes (string, integer, floating point number, and so on) and does not provide a means of defining new types, as object-oriented programming languages do.

Second, objects in an object-oriented program have unique identities that allow two objects of the same value to be distinguished from one another. By contrast, SQL rows (the SQL notion nearest to the notion of an object) do not have unique identities: if two rows in a given table have identical values, they are indistinguishable.