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

Joachim Werner joe@iuveno-net.de
Fri, 11 May 2001 20:38:08 +0200


> 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?

Most of the time nobody will need SQL. And having a transparent,
transaction-aware and undoable persistent Object store is really a cool
thing. But from time to time you will hit walls. That's when the object
paradigm just does not do the job completely well any more. E.g. how would
you handle objects beloning to more than one container? In SQL this is easy
(Just have a table that matches key pairs from the container table and the
item table). And I don't know any good way of implementing "many-to-many"
relations in object hierarchies. Let alone querying them efficiently.

Joachim