Sven,
Am 25.04.14 22:44, schrieb Sven Van Caekenberghe:
But one of his points was that ORM layers made SQL obsolete by hiding much of
its power, the ability to do (query and other) processing on the DB.
Hmm. I think what the article said was that you give up much of the
power and flexibility of SQL by using ORMs, but not that SQL was thereby
obsoleted. You give up on much of the power of SQL, but you also get a
lot of work done for you on the object side.
Plus, you can always issue SQL statements to the database if you need
to. Of course you need to be aware that what you are doing could
undermine the bookkeeping of the ORM layer. Glorp, as an example, can
also build very sophisticated queries for object retrieval, like
subqueries, outer joins and whatnot. I am only slowly learning about the
power that's buried in there. So you can in fact use (a good portion of)
the power of SQL in GLORP for object lookup. And you can choose to
bypass it for special cases where you want to use SQL directly. You are
wandering between two worlds then, but you can if you need to.
BTW, I don't think there is such a thing as transparent persistency.
I came to the same conclusion. The most transparent-y thing I can think
of is saving an image. Of course there is no ACID in it. Maybe Gemstone
is almost as close to it, but only as long as you are not using very
large Collections and stuff, because then you need to program for it
(even if it seems to be relatively straightforward).
Joachim
