acceptable way to program

Hi,

Recently I have been looking at the various ways people are implementing, interaction between java & oracle databases.

I was always instructed on the purity of the data model, "normalize the data" etc.

 I have seen people Serializing java objects , such as purchase orders orders, customer records etc , then sticking the "object" into am oracle blob column.

finally when they want to retrieve it they de-serialize the object., work on it then re-serialize and stuff it back into the oracle blob.

to me this causes the following problems:

1. the object can become very big, and can only be recovered in it's entirety, and if it contains pictures ,etc, it can become huge.
2. the object becomes "closed", in that it cannot be modified or checked in situ
3. it cannot be searched , without de-serialization.

I'm looking to implement a java front end, (oracle back end), system ,that allows a product , to be inspected by an inspection team , and comments/ photographic record kept.

using an "object approach" would make it very simple, but the size of the resulting object could be very large.

does anyone have any thoughts how to accomplish this task.

steve Received on Fri Dec 31 2004 - 01:38:20 CST