Other academic staff involved include Dr. Frans Henskens, Dr. Alan Fekete and Mr. Michael Hollins at Sydney, as well as Dr. Michael Hitchens at the University of Western Sydney. The group maintains a close association with research groups at the University of Adelaide, University of St. Andrews, Scotland and at the University of Ulm, Germany. Orthogonal persistence means that all data types may be persistent and that data may be manipulated in a uniform manner regardless of the length of time it persists. Orthogonal persistence is not found in contemporary operating systems, nor most programming languages or database systems. Traditionally, long term data is maintained in a database or file system and short term data is managed by a programming language.
Systems supporting orthogonal persistence have major advantages over conventional systems.
These include significant reductions in code development time, efficiency improvements through better memory utilisation and a higher level of code re-use. In addition, with appropriate hardware support, persistent systems can offer fine-grain control over access to data resulting in highly secure systems. In general persistent systems may be seen as a viable alternative to conventional database systems, offering greater flexibility, particularly in cases where large and complex data structures must be maintained. The current major projects within the group are summarised below. Despite the fact that the basic idea behind orthogonal persistence is very simple, research groups are finding it extremely hard to develop scalable and efficient persistent stores.