What is an Object-Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS)?

An Object-Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS) integrates features from both object-oriented databases and traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS). This means that an ORDBMS provides the flexibility of object-oriented data modeling, allowing developers to store complex data types, such as images, multimedia, and user-defined data types, alongside the structured data typically managed in relational databases.

This hybrid model enables the representation of more complex relationships and behaviors, supporting both the relational data model with tables, rows, and columns, and object-oriented concepts such as inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. As a result, ORDBMS systems can cater to a wider range of applications and use cases that benefit from both the robustness of relational data structures and the complexity of object-oriented programming.

The other options do not accurately capture the essence of an ORDBMS. For instance, purely object-oriented databases do not leverage relational features, while a system that does not support relationships or is categorized solely as SQL does not encompass the unique integration of object-oriented capabilities.