Object-Relational Mapping

I've been thinking a lot lately about the object relational mismatch. It's interesting to note that relational databases and object-oriented programming basically evolved around the same time, yet they're not very compatible with each other.

There's been a lot of good posts on the subject, such as Jeff Atwood's Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science. He basically concludes that there are 4 solutions to the problem: Give up relational databases, give up objects, manually map between them, or use an object-relational mapper.

Recently I had concluded that object relational mapping is the way to go. Now I'm not so sure. As I was looking at some example code for a Python ORM called Peewee, I realized something: with ORMs, you are still essentailly defining all of your models as relations. You're just doing it in code rather than in SQL. For example consider this example model definition for a blog from the Peewee documentation:

class Blog(BaseModel):
    name = CharField() # <-- VARCHAR

class Entry(BaseModel):
    headline = CharField()
    content = TextField() # <-- TEXT
    pub_date = DateTimeField() # <-- DATETIME
    blog = ForeignKeyField(Blog) # <-- INTEGER referencing the Blog table

Notice that we have to specify the type of a database column with each of our attributes. Since Python has no explicitly typed variables from which to infer this information, I guess this is permissible. Further notice that our entry has a ForeignKeyField that specifies the relationship between Entry and Blog. What we're left with is little more than a razor-thin layer of abstraction put on top of a relational database.

These objects would look quite a bit different if we weren't so concerned about mapping them. In particular, Blog would likely have a list of Entry, rather than each Entry having a "foreign key" to Blog.

Maybe making our classes look more like relations is the price we pay. It's certainly more appealing than maintaining manual mapping code, and most businesses are wary of using an object store that the developers essentially have exclusive control over.

This is a hard problem. I guess that's why Ted Neward calls it the Vietnam of Computer Science.