Is it possible to use a database though any high-level API?

I hope I am posting this in the correct group, I am quite new to usenet posting.

I have only been working in the computer area for a couple of years, and my experience with databases is limited to a five week course during my education.

As I think about an application I want to develop, I have a question about databases that I would love to have someone shine a light on.

The question is, is there any programming tool available so that I do not need to contruct a database "by hand", that is, I would like to have an API to use so that I can easily store the implemented objects in my object-oriented solution without caring about how they are stored?

It seems to me that it would be a perfect task for a computer to translate my objects into relational tables or some object-oriented representation. It seems redundant that I should have to create TWO models, one in the object-oriented implementation, and one for the database (for instance creating tables with columns and so on), when the two models are just different representations of the same objects and relations between objects (or am I totally wrong here?)

Performance is not a big issue in this case.

Are there any such tools, and if not, why not?

I imagine myself using the tool somewhat like this:

If I have two classes, Person and House, and a House can have one Person as an owner:

Person bob = new Person("Bob")
House castle = new House("Castle")

castle.owner = bob

(owner may for instance be a property, storing a reference to a Person object)

To store the objects, it would be neat to use something like:

MagicAPI.store(bob)
MagicAPI.store(castle)

without caring about "rows" or "columns" or even relational or obejctoriented  databases. (Of course somewhere there had to be information about exactly where and how to store things, but this would be simple configuration settings)

To search it would be great to use som SQL like syntax like:

listOfHouses = MagicAPI.find("House WHERE owner=bob")

Or perhaps create a Find object from the MagicAPI, set all search criteria, and the invoke the find method of the Find object.

I guess it would be neccessary to somehow explicitly define unique identifiers ("primary keys") to classes. Perhaps like this:

MagicAPI.setUnique(Person, IDNumber)

where IDNumber might be a property of the class Person representing the social security number. The API would then react if trying to add two persons with the same IDNumber.

I know this example is simple, but I hope it illustrates the general idea of what I am looking for.

I think it would be really nice if programming towards a database could be somewhat like programming againt a high level file API (e.g. from the OS). I often dont really care about how a file is stored on a bit level. As performance is not a big issue for me in this case, I dont really care how the database is implemented, as long as the database maintains the relationships between stored objects.

Thank you in advance!

/Fredrik Strandberg Received on Thu Apr 12 2007 - 15:44:48 CEST