I didn't for a mement think you intended to start a fight. I suspect Jamie thought that because he has seen fights between "relational" people and "oo people" before. But his point that this is neither the time nor the place applies equally to the debate about how OODBMS differs from RDBMS, or to the debate about what an OODBMS should or shouldn't be, as to a fight - this thread is for discussing the question and answer about VS that Jamie supplied, not for drifting off into distant theoretical realms. If we want to have tthe OODBMS discussion (and it might be a useful one to have) we should start a thread specifically (if one doesn't already exist - it may do) for it rather than hijacking Jamie's thread for it. I'll give you a short answer here, because it's easy: since there is no broad agreement amongst OO people interested in databases (nor indeed amongst database people interested in OO) as to what an OODBMS should be (or would be, or could be, or is - people don't even agree on which of these verb forms is appropriate here) the only sensible answer to your question is "I don't know" (but I would also say that it's pretty unclear how or even whether normalisation would apply to an OODBMS). The discussion can be continued elsewhere, if you wish.