oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

[David Brown]

At 11:45 AM 5/11/2001 -0600, Casey Duncan wrote:

>One of the biggest limitations in my mind is the lack of a general query
>language for the ZODB like what you get with most OODBMS and all RDBMS.

I used to think this as well.

But isn't Python a decent query language?  Isn't it nice to be able to have 
all of the facilities of Python at your disposal when manipulating data, 
rather than hoping that whatever database you are using doesn't have a 
brain-damaged implementation of SQL?

Isn't it nice not to have to convert back and forth between SQL types and 
native types?  Isn't it nice not to have to swap in your SQL mind in the 
middle of your Python program?

Having a general query language makes it easy for people who know that 
particular general query language to write programs.  It makes it easy to 
access a bunch of different data sources, at least until the monster named 
"implementation differences" rears it's ugly head.

We've all spent years learning to make our programs interface with 
databases, learning how to jump the mental chasm between our programs and 
they way they want to manipulate data, and the way that the database wants 
to manipulate data.  Isn't it nice not to have to do that any more?

Don't get me wrong, I believe I get your point.  SQL implementations are 
getting more and more compatible.  There are OODBMS query languages 
specified.  There's no really good way of making different programming 
languages and programming environments interoperate without some sort of 
common meeting ground, like a general query language.

And perhaps I'm overdoing the response, perhaps I've gone off in a 
different direction.  I've just been thinking about this quite a bit lately.

dave