In shipbuilding area, data sharing is one of the crucial issues. Recently, for collaborative design, ship structural CAD systems adopt the database as its primary storage. Database is useful to deal with the large amount of design information among the heterogeneous design department and design stage. To make the database-based CAD system object-oriented database(OODB) and object-relational database(ORDB) can be used. It is important to select proper database because the CAD system performance mainly depends on access performance of database. In this research, using prototype CAD system from other research, access performance of OODB and ORDB form CAD system was evaluated. STEP application protocol was used as the database schema and experiment was made in query by property and query by region. The results give some idea of how to choose the database for CAD systems.