> So I'm reading, apart from loading a whole row (which could be a > problem for records with BLOBS, nested datasets etc), there was no > major performance penalty.
To me, it certainly felt like there was a penalty. As to the reason for the penalty, I suspect that your suggestion of multiple table joins was part of it, but I'm not in a position to investigate or comment in any detail now. More generally, abstraction has its cost. That cost is usually not too significant for in-memory operations on modern CPUs. It can even work with intensive data accesses in non-cached memory or *even* on fast local disks. But if the cost of abstraction is overlaid on relatively-slow network database connections (i.e. any normal, live, real-world database application), then at times it can become too much to bear. My personal feeling from a performance/value point of view is that this whole area -- much like .NET itself -- is where Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were in the late 80s. Win3.1, let alone Win95, is still a ways off yet. But Win3.1 did happen, eventually -- mainly because the hardware caught up with its demands. So when we all have database servers employing well-exploited parallel processors and super-fast disks and unsaturated +Gbit LANs, all may fall into place. But, as I've observed recently, this isn't going to happen quite as fast as we've become used to. cheers, peter _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list [email protected] http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi
