Episode 55: Object-Relational Mapping

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Tired of the same old database grind? Why not try an Object Relational Mapper.

News/Follow-ups

• 00:38 – Jade likes his tablet again, thanks to Windows 7

Geek Tool

• 04:25 – The perfect Valentines geek tool, Heart Warmer

Webapps

• 07:11 – Ketchup – Super simple meeting agenda creator
• 08:15 - MinuteBase – Collaborate on meeting notes

Topic

• 16:19 – Object-relational mapping
  • What is it?
  • Typical non-ORM work flow
• Pros
  • Less code, just manipulating the objects
  • OOP you are working with objects already
  • Data language is in your language, don’t need to learn new syntax
  • Inheritance
  • Distributed database security
  • Benefit of the knowledge of everyone writing the ORM
  • Database integration abstraction
  • Switch database back-ends with little hassle (depending on ORM)
• Cons
  • Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
  • Poorly designed databases
  • Because you are working strictly with the database, databases usually aren’t optimized
  • Overhead
  • ORMs have a lot overhead that can affect performance
• Examples
  • Ruby
    • ActiveRecord
    • Datamapper
  • Python
    • Django
    • SQLAlchemy
  • PHP
    • CakePHP
    • Doctrine

Tags: activerecord, cakephp, database, datamapper, doctrine, ketchup, minutebase, oop, orm, php, Python, ruby, security, sqlalchemy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 8:19 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Episode 55: Object-Relational Mapping”

• Brian Says:
  February 27th, 2010 at 8:29 am

  We use ORMs for every new project. The pros far outweigh the cons. We use a bottom up approach so we design the database first. The only time I wouldn’t possibly use one is when working with a legacy database. There are a lot of poorly designed databases out there.

  Two more ORMs.

  Java – Hibernate
  .Net – nHibernate
• Jade Robbins Says:
  February 27th, 2010 at 9:46 am

  So you design the database, then wrap the ORM around it. That is a good way to keep your databases optimized and sane. I didn’t really think about that
• Brian Says:
  February 27th, 2010 at 11:25 am

  Exactly. We use Seam Framework and this is the preferred approach. Once the database is in place we run a generator that looks at the database and creates all of the entities, wiring, and views. It is much like scaffolding in Rails. You have a working CRUD app at this point to work with.

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