Marcin Kuszczak wrote:
Christopher Wright wrote:
Aarti_pl wrote:
...and this high-level design is IMHO mistake. Especially mapping
relations from db to objects.
Well maybe someone will give me examples where domain objects are more
useful than relations? From my observations presentation layer (GUI) is
also relational, so I don't see a sense with making conversions:
relation -> object -> relation.
I am working on db access framework which makes use of relations rather
than creating objects. And it makes it in typesafe way...
BR
Marcin Kuszczak
(aarti_pl)
It's fine if you're just doing CRUD operations. At my job, we do staff
scheduling software -- I'd kill myself if I had to write the scheduling
engine or rule violation code in terms of database rows. And that would
be a major performance issue.
Well, really I don't get what the problem is here. Could you please elaborate
more?
Scheduling, you assign people to shifts. That's a many-to-many
relationship. If I just had database rows, assigning would be a matter
of adding a row. With real objects, I have a set of people associated
with each shift. This means it's O(1) to check if someone's assigned
rather than O(number of assignments).
There are a lot of things like this. You can use the active record
pattern, but that's essentially an implementation detail for ORM.
A good ORM solution will help prevent data inconsistency issues. Let's
say you need this superfast query in one area but it returns some data
that you already have. If you manipulated that data in memory already
and haven't committed it to the database already (because database
access is slow, so you don't want to be committing everything all the
time), your application will be in an inconsistent state.
Yes, probably there are ORM solutions which keeps data consistent . But please notice
that "keeping data consistent" is not a property of ORM itself. It's just that
people implemented something like that in ORM systems. I am sure that it is possible to
make data consistency layer also in relational system. I just don't want object Person in
my program, but instead just row with person's data.
You want a database interaction layer that will return the same row for
multiple queries, assuming that the row has the same primary key.
Joins are an issue with this. You're not updating a row retrieved from a
join, but you're getting it from the database, and your in-memory row
might be dirty.
Also, touching the database is slow. It requires inter-process
communication; it requires translating data from the database's internal
format to whichever format it sends over the wire; it requires
translating from that intermediate format to something the application
can handle.
Sure. But mapping this resulting format into objects is even slower. That's in
fact one of major arguments against ORM.
If you can do your query in memory, that's often going to be
faster.
Again. Queries in memory is not a property of ORM. In fact you make them always
when you iterate specific collection e.g. searching for specific value.
True, thank you for correcting me.
There's still one problem with doing queries, even if you ignore
database access. How are you going to arrange these rows? If you want to
do interesting operations, not just CRUD, will it be sufficiently fast
to have arrays or sets of rows? And will this be convenient from a
programming point of view? If not, you're left with implementing active
record yourself.
If you are merely doing CRUD operations, a decent ORM might be able to
write your queries and database schema for you. If the result is
reasonable, you've saved a fair bit of time. If not, you've wasted a
small amount of time.
If you have significant business logic, in my experience, you're better
off with ORM.
In general I prefer ORM. At the very least to translate rows into
objects, and to write basic CRUD queries for me; that keeps my database
access layer up to date.
Also, it's a lot faster to write code with ORM than it is to write
custom SQL. I've heard people saying that if you are writing a custom
database layer in SQL, you're stealing from your employer. This
presumes, of course, that you're working in a language with a suitable
ORM library available.
Well I think that it is just because that there was a lot of man-power putted
into ORM frameworks. And that was probably just because of philosophical
reasons - not pragmatical. :-)
So what you're saying is that a lot of strangers put a lot of effort
into ORM, and this means that I don't have to do as much work. I'm happy
with that.
Please see also my other post about my Db access framework.
