> On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Kenneth Downs wrote: > > That's a personal opinion, not a system requirement.
We *can* agree that SQL is not PHP (or Ruby or Python). > What's a "conceptual relationship?" If you put your data into tables, > then the relationships between the tables are foreign keys. That's easier > to handle in set-based SQL, the language that was designed to do it. Noone writes apps in pure SQL :-) One has to take off their OOP hat, replace with a SQL hat, and translate what you are trying to build into whatever tables / rows / columns / relations you can model in SQL. So if you're using an OOP language (and I do include PHP5 in that category) you have to do that mapping anyway (until we get object-based databases perhaps). In fact, most data structures need to be mapped (how do you store a tree in a relational database? You don't, at least not without some mapping process to SQL). >Actually you don't need ORM for that, you just need a generalized set of > commands, like "db_query" instead of "pg_query" and "mysql_query". In other words, another layer of abstraction? Like ORM but not using objects? :-) For me, it comes down to a choice between dealing with mappings and all the database plumbing that that entails vs. letting an ORM layer manage all that so I can concentrate on business logic and application flow. Of course, there's always a trade off, like most things - I just think writing say: event = Event.find(1) event.title = "New title" event.save more naturally expresses what Im doing than: UPDATE events SET TITLE="New title" where id=1 Once you start defining and updating many-to-many relationships, the SQL becomes much more complex compared to writing code. I know I won't convince you but I think it important for people to hear both sides and make up their own minds. p.s. What the hell is v-webmail? Your email was unreplyable in Pine and WebMail. I had to manually copy and paste your comments... -- Aj. _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
