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This is the worst gibberish I've ever read!

Story: O/R Mismatch is "The Vietnam of Computer Science"Total Replies: 1
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phsolide

Feb 13, 2007
10:28 AM EST 		That is, I almost understood it. Really good gibberish would be totally incomprehensible.

Seriously, folks, isn't a Viet Nam war metaphor really stretching it? And also, hands up, those who are surprised by a "mismatch" between "object oriented" and "fill in the blank"?

Guess what? Relational databases have a mathematical foundation. "Object oriented" does not. It's just a conflation of a few concepts (abstract data types, exceptions, inheritance) that a small set of programmers have found helpful. The rest of us find "object oriented" to constitute a narrow minded straightjacket imposed by pointy-haired "enterprise architects".
swbrown

Feb 14, 2007
8:59 PM EST 		O/R issues are actually pretty annoying to deal with. Layer upon layer of mapping where the strong features of both models wind up cut out until you have something somewhat in common that almost doesn't suck but does.

Personally, I'd like to see a movement towards an XML DOM model with indexed XML, XPath/XQuery, and XEvents as the new crossover model, with conditional pub/sub via XPath as the remote query/notify abstraction (xmlblaster does a variant of this). You could even implement it transparently on the filesystem with some added semantics making it a bit like a unified theory of data. There are several MoM projects that try use of XML as the description language at some level, but unfortunately pretty much all of them take the copout of still doing an object mapping at the last mapping layer.

The only example I can think of where that final mapping layer is removed is the Jabber 1.4 source (might be 2.0 also). XML fragments are passed through the architecture directly as the canonical data type, and it makes use of several of the benefits of that, like appending and encapsulating different namespaces of data as the fragments are passed around the system which you can't (smoothly) do with either pure object or pure relational. It was revolutionary when it was written in the '90s, and unfortunately, it still is revolutionary.

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