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

[David Brown]

At 08:38 PM 5/11/2001 +0200, you wrote:

 >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).

I could do the same thing with Python, creating a dictionary that does the 
mapping.  You'd have to maintain the dictionary, sure, but you'd have to 
maintain the table in a relational database as well.

 > And I don't know any good way of implementing "many-to-many"
 >relations in object hierarchies. Let alone querying them efficiently.

Well, then we need a many-to-many mapping object.  The point is that we 
could do this in Python and make the classes available, rather than 
morphing our thought processes into whatever shape the RDBMS wants.

We're just missing some functionality, but it can be written without 
rewriting the database code, because we can just store our objects 
(representing indices or mappings or whatever) directly.

The cool thing about object stores is that you can use the object modeling 
tools to do the job, and come up with specific (and more efficient) 
solutions, rather than mapping a general (and possibly slower) solution 
onto a specific problem.

dave