Question: Gail M. Shaw and Stanley B. Zdonik. "A Query Algebra for Object-Oriented Databases." Proc. 6th International Conference on Data Engineering (February 1990). Also Technical Report TR CS-89-19, Dept. of Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI (March 1989). This paper serves to support the present writer's contention that any " algebra" will be inherently complex (because objects are complex). In particular, equality of arbitrarily nested hierarchic objects requires very careful treatment. The basic idea behind the specific proposals of this paper is that each query algebra operator produces a relation, in which each tuple contains OIDs for certain database objects. In the case of join, for example, each tuple contains OlDs of objects that match one another under the joining condition. Those tuples do not inherit any methods from the component objects.