Comments on: A Defense of OODBMS http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/a-defense-of-oodbms/ programming, politics, & other religious issues Sat, 28 Aug 2010 04:27:21 +0000 hourly 1 By: bhurt http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/a-defense-of-oodbms/#comment-31082 bhurt Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:28:01 +0000 http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/archive/2007/06/13/254#comment-31082 What would an OO programmer say to some who is claiming that they wrote an OO program, but upon inspection that program only has one class, which is never instantiated? Don't laugh- I've seen code like that. The nicest thing the OO programmer would probably say is that program isn't an OO program, it's a procedural program. OO programs are about manipulating objects, and relationships between objects. Now, consider a program with very few classes and objects, and almost no interactions between them. OK, slightly more OO, but still really not. In this sense, the object-relational mapping problem has been solved by throwing away the relational part. SQL works on relations (aka tables aka views) the same way that Java or Ruby work on objects- it's the chunk size the language is most comfortable with. By throwing away the relational aspect- the operations on whole tables which is the fundamental concept of relational databases- you throw away what the relational database is best at. So of course it's going to suck. Try programming Ruby without objects some time. The hard work to make a real object-relational mapping hasn't been done yet. It hasn't even been started yet. Brian What would an OO programmer say to some who is claiming that they wrote an OO program, but upon inspection that program only has one class, which is never instantiated? Don’t laugh- I’ve seen code like that.

The nicest thing the OO programmer would probably say is that program isn’t an OO program, it’s a procedural program. OO programs are about manipulating objects, and relationships between objects.

Now, consider a program with very few classes and objects, and almost no interactions between them. OK, slightly more OO, but still really not.

In this sense, the object-relational mapping problem has been solved by throwing away the relational part. SQL works on relations (aka tables aka views) the same way that Java or Ruby work on objects- it’s the chunk size the language is most comfortable with.

By throwing away the relational aspect- the operations on whole tables which is the fundamental concept of relational databases- you throw away what the relational database is best at. So of course it’s going to suck. Try programming Ruby without objects some time.

The hard work to make a real object-relational mapping hasn’t been done yet. It hasn’t even been started yet.

Brian

]]> By: Enfranchised Mind » NullPointerExceptions Are Not Helpful http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/a-defense-of-oodbms/#comment-31080 Enfranchised Mind » NullPointerExceptions Are Not Helpful Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:46:26 +0000 http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/archive/2007/06/13/254#comment-31080 [...] I knew it wouldn’t be long before I encountered a great example of how Hibernate does not qualify as making ORM easy (despite what Gavin King might say). [...] [...] I knew it wouldn’t be long before I encountered a great example of how Hibernate does not qualify as making ORM easy (despite what Gavin King might say). [...]

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