Re: Is it really that bad?

"Michael Wiik" wrote :

> but I had no idea that such a bastardization was common. No wonder all
> the SQL queries, which should have been simple, were becoming hideously
> complex.
>

I've seen some really bad mixtures of OO concepts and an RDBMS environment myself.

I think the OO world evolved a data model that resembles a network, in heap space, of records linked together by pointers. An object model was then layered directly on top of this. They then applied this model of data to persistent storage to come up with OODB. The result reminds me, startlingly, of the old CODASYL databases that were left behind when relational DB came of age. Records and pointers, records and pointers.

Some databases seem to me to be using FK/PK relationships to accomplish nothing that record pointers wouldn't have done equally well. Others migrate the relationships from metadata back into user data, leaving the dba totally in the dark about what any of the data really means. It supposedly doesn't matter, because the knowledge is embedded in the object model anyway.

I think these are all recipes for disaster. But the OO people just talk to me like I'm one of the holdouts in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".

Sometime, I'm going to have to make time to read up on the Object-Relational model, or on how to design a relational DB starting from an analysis done using ORM. There must be a good way of reconciling these two world views.

--
Regards,
    David Cressey
    www.dcressey.com