I'd rather play golf

This past Saturday, ORM toolkit provider X-tensive.com announced ORMBattle.Net, “The ORM Tool Shootout”. What X-tensive has done is they’ve created a “benchmark” to test the efficiency of various ORM toolkit implementations, and then published the results, comparing Microsoft’s Entity Framework, Lightspeed, LLBLGenPro, NHibernate, OpenAccess, and Subsonic with X-tensive’s own ORM toolkit, DataObjects.Net. Unsurprisingly, the performance [...]

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Object-relational mapping toolkits such as Hibernate/NHibernate, LINQ, and others permit one to develop object-oriented database applications in the paradigm offered by the object-oriented language (Java, C#, C++) and workaround the issues of the impedance mismatch between the application’s abstractions and the persistent relational store. My colleague Jason Hinsperger has written previously regarding the additional complexity [...]

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I just recently purchased Roger Jennings’ book, entitled Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework. This is as complete a guide as you’ll find to the various implementations of LINQ: both LINQ-to-SQL (now discouraged by Microsoft) and LINQ-to-entities are covered in considerable detail. What I really appreciate within the book are Roger’s descriptions [...]

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For more than a decade we at iAnywhere have been arguing that schema and query complexity is largely uncorrelated to the size of the database instance, or the characteristics of the hardware platform: In our experience, there is little correlation between application or schema complexity, and the database size or deployment platform. Developers tend to [...]

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Over the past few weeks I’ve tripped over a couple of interesting items that pertain to database system trends and what the future in database systems might look like over the near-to-medium term. Gazing into the proverbial “crystal ball” is fraught with uncertainty, but the authors of this material represent the world’s best database researchers, [...]

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The May/June issue of ACM Queue magazine (and the final one in print form) is devoted to object-relational mappings and ORM software. This issue features four articles on ORM technology from differing perspectives, and is an excellent introduction to the technology and its potential pitfalls. The articles include: An interview with Erik Meijer and Jose [...]

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SQL has a very long history, eventually beating out other data access sublanguages such as QUEL, SQUARE, and a host of others. As I have mentioned elsewhere, SQL is now so popular there has been very little research in the area of database query languages for nearly two decades. While SQL remains popular, it has [...]

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One of my personal goals for the next while will be to evaluate the state-of-the-art with respect to various technologies that offer abstractions to an underlying relational database system, and, in many cases, hide SQL from the application development process. Some of these technologies are commonly called “abstraction layers”, or “interfaces”, while others, particularly object-oriented [...]

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