Will ORM take off?

ORM (in the guise of NIAM) has been around for many years. Now that MS appears to be investing quite a bit into ORM - see latest .NET show <http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/> - do practitioners feel that ORM may break through and start to rival other notations such as ERD's? (of course ORM is more than a notation - it's a methodology)

Or is ORM forever doomed to be one of those "nice ideas" that never really takes off? It is actually quite popular here in Brisbane Australia (mainly due to Terry Halpins evangelisation efforts while he was here) - but AIUI ORM is not even on the radar screen for the vast majority of IT professionals out there.

One problem I see for ORM is lack of tool support - VisioModeller is quite nice (and free) but lacks the sophistication of Visio Enterprise Architect (2002) and the sort of features that would make ERD poeple sit up and notice. VisioEA is now only available as part of the .NET Visual Studio Enterprise ed. ($5,500 aussie dollars!) - so basically unless your part of the high-end of the MS development world you won't have access to what looks like a great tool.

Murray Received on Fri Jun 28 2002 - 05:18:14 CEST