Ask HN: What niche/forgotten technologies do you wish were more mainstream?
For me, I mentioned object databases a bit, and I think there&#x27;s still a gap here not yet filled by RDBMSes or NoSQL.<p>The old object databases (now mostly-forgotten products like POET, ObjectStore, Matisse and Objectivity) were too tightly tied to a serialization format. Many of them wanted location transparency, where your app just worked with &quot;objects&quot;, and they happened to be remote and persisted to disk — the same awful design mistake that doomed CORBA and, to an extent, DCOM. Turns out this data model requires a tight coupling between a language&#x27;s OO classes and the persistence model, and it&#x27;s also means that code that looks like it&#x27;s working on RAM objects can&#x27;t optimize for data paths in the way that SQL can.<p>Then there were systems like GemStone and Caché, which were tightly coupled to a single language&#x2F;runtime (Smalltalk and M respectively). Probably very productive, but ultimately a dead evolutionary end.<p>At this point I think it&#x27;s possible to have a hybrid database that&#x27;s good at both relational-type and object-graph-type queries, i.e. to collect a huge amount of structured data with joins etc., but without the tabular requirement.