  The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Science Archive is the first in a series of
multi-Terabyte digital archives in Astronomy and other data-intensive sciences.
To facilitate data mining in the SDSS archive, we adapted a commercial database
engine and built specialized tools on top of it. Originally we chose an
object-oriented database management system due to its data organization
capabilities, platform independence, query performance and conceptual fit to
the data. However, after using the object database for the first couple of
years of the project, it soon began to fall short in terms of its query support
and data mining performance. This was as much due to the inability of the
database vendor to respond our demands for features and bug fixes as it was due
to their failure to keep up with the rapid improvements in hardware
performance, particularly faster RAID disk systems. In the end, we were forced
to abandon the object database and migrate our data to a relational database.
We describe below the technical issues that we faced with the object database
and how and why we migrated to relational technology.
