M. Pasch’s scientific contributions

This is a study of the performance progress of the SanFrancisco™ project from the time the decision was made to base it on the Java™ language up to the time SanFrancisco applications were successfully deployed in the marketplace—from February 1997 until late 1999. We document the challenges, decisions, and technologies that were encountered during the three-year development period that saw performance improve by orders of magnitude. Key areas that allowed us to achieve this improvement were intelligent object caching, improved object access strategies, use of commands (function shipping), efficient mapping of objects to the underlying database, appropriate usage of Java, programmer education, and acquiring (or building) needed tools. We also discuss several areas where challenges remain and more progress is needed.