Wow some great replies and I'm really glad I asked the question now.
This one from Abu Hurayrah* was the kind of insight I was after when
I said "particularly from those who have a database admin leaning and
have opinions about its efficiency"...
Additionally, ORM will enforce consistent queries, enable (but not
force) higher security standards due to consistency of query
structure and actually lets the programmers work on writing their
code efficiently, and the database blokes (such as myself) can work
behind the scenes transparently optimizing the internals of how the
object-oriented abstractions work
I also liked the "added-value" in Rob Allen's idea...
One option would be to cache the describe (forever!) when in
production mode though and not cache at all in dev mode.
Personally, I've used a form of DESCRIBE caching but all I did was to
serialize the info and write it to a "database_structure" file,
rewriting it when any changes are made to the database in this manner:
/*
* Uncomment to rewrite database structure file
*
foreach( $dataConnection->MetaTables() as $key => $value )
{
$database[$value] = $dataConnection->MetaColumns( $value );
}
$File->WriteFile( $database, TRUE );
*/
$dataConnection->Tables = $File->ReadFile( TRUE );
I notice that Rob you have a "Zend_Db_Schema_Manager" in proposal and
wonder whether it, or something like it, could be used by
Zend_Db_Table in some way?
Anyway, thanks to you all I think I "geddit" a bit more and will be
looking at the progression of Zend_Db_Table a bit less suspiciously now.
Nick
* OT: I was going to shorten your name but presuming it to be Arabic
and knowing the shortening of Arabic names is often done wrong I
refrained.
Very OT: Interestingly, in an almost shamefully geeky way, Arabic
naming almost has a namespace type convention so "Saleh bin Tariq bin
Khalid Al-Fulani" using dot notation could well be written as Al-
Fulani.Khaled.Tariq.Saleh. Anyway, meant an interesting diversion to
Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_name ).
