Effect on TopLink

Object-relational databases introduce several new features that allow more complex data to be stored and accessed. One advantage of object-relational databases is that the differences between the object model and data model can be reduced to the point that the two are almost identical. Although this makes the object-relational mapping process easier, it does not reduce the need for a persistence framework such as TopLink. Although the JDBC standard has been improved to take advantage of object-relational features in JDBC 2.0, it still remains a low-level database interface. On top of JDBC, frameworks such as TopLink can provide applications with much more sophisticated functionality, including units of work, identity maps, expressions, querying, complex mappings, three-tier and enterprise application support.