Re: Object-relational impedence
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 00:32:54 -0600
Message-ID: <2008030600325454666-unclebob_at_objectmentorcom>
On 2008-03-05 09:48:45 -0600, Marshall <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> said:
> On Mar 4, 11:05 pm, Robert Martin <uncle..._at_objectmentor.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Furthermore, since OOPLs lack physical independence, traversing
>>> the graph may be quite expensive, particularly in the case where
>>> the graph is backed by storage in a database, which is part of
>>> why ORM is such a universally bad idea.
>>
>> No, you have this wrong. ORMs generally use standard SQL queries to
>> traverse and gather data from the DB. Then that data is placed into OO
>> structures so that the application can take advanage of the bias.
>
> Just the fact that they use SQL isn't sufficient. They have to
> use it as well as a person could, though an interface that
> is generally information-lossy enough (or at least, used in
> a lossy way) that that's impossible.
Yeah, assembly language programmers used to say the same thing about compilers. Then the compilers started writing more efficient code than the assembly language programmers could...
In any case, good ORMs allow you to tune the SQL, so you *can* use it
as well as a person could.
> The most gratuitous example I can think of was some early
It is illustrative of a programmer who either doesn't know his tool or
> EJB containers I played with, back when I was still thinking
> that ORM was something that could possibly be done well.
> Against a table of a few hundred rows, one could execute
> "delete from table". The comparable command through the
> ORM issued SQL to load every row as an object, then
> in a loop called obj.delete() which issued a single DELETE
> statement for that row. It was ten thousand times slower,
> and that's for only a couple hundred rows. Of course this
> example is extreme, but it's still illustrative of a general
> principle.
>
> I have *often* seen four and five order of magnitude
> performance difference between straight SQL and
> ORM SQL, across a wide variety of ORMs. The
> very idea of ORM demands it: you have to try to
> push a whole set-oriented language through a functional
> interface.
Bah. You don't *have* to do any such thing. I won't argue that there aren't programmers and teams who use their tools poorly.
-- Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) | email: unclebob_at_objectmentor.com Object Mentor Inc. | blog: www.butunclebob.com The Agile Transition Experts | web: www.objectmentor.com 800-338-6716 |Received on Thu Mar 06 2008 - 07:32:54 CET