Jonathans point has a lot of merit as well (ive seen PJE make the
same point); if you have a big application with multiple servers and
all, its often better to represent user-oriented concepts in a more
explicit and fine-grained way rather than a serialized (the other
kind of serialized) BLOB.
... which is not to say that there are no use cases for "select ... for update," because there are, and I've run into some myself, but it's infrequent enough that I'd prefer to drop down to sql on those occasions to avoid complicating the ORM with a lock manager a la Hibernate.
--
Jonathan Ellis
http://spyced.blogspot.com
