An **object-oriented database** is a kind a database in which the information is stored in objects, following the [[Object-Oriented Programming|object-oriented paradigm]]. The main advantages they propose over [[Relational Database|relational databases]] are that, by using objects instead of mapping directly to memory, the relationships can be expressed using pointers. That way, small procedures are easier to write and can express very complex data, that does not easily fit into a row-column representation (for example, complex JSON structures). Most of the object-oriented database research was brought into the industry via the [[Object-Relational Database]] paradigm, and especially [[PostgreSQL]].