From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2005-11-03T13:46:54+09:00
Subject: Re: The "perfect" ORM?

Duane Johnson wrote:
> 
> On Oct 30, 2005, at 5:52 AM, Dave Burt wrote:
> 
>>> Basically the only thing missing from a YAML solution or something is
>>> the ability to do sophisticated queries without storing all the  objects
>>> in memory at once.
>>>
>>> Given that I may have 100,000 objects or so, I don't want to store  them
>>> all in a giant array, but I *do* want to be able to find them by the
>>> values of their accessors.
>>
>>
>> So Marshalled objects plus indexes?
>>
> 
> Nice summary, Dave.  If this is indeed what Hal is talking about, it  
> seems like a very nice "fit".

I guess I never replied to this one. I'm not sure that this is the
way I would state it, but it's mostly correct.

After all, complex queries don't depend on indexes. Indexes just make
them faster.

>  From off the top of my head, an ideal data repository has the  
> following qualities:
> 
> 1. Infinite storage capacity
> 2. Zero access time
> 3. Persistent / Failsafe

I would add transparency with regard to objects. That is, I don't want
to assemble and disassemble my objects from records manually.

  > It seems that "Marshalled objects + Indexes" gives us this happy  middle
> ground--most of the time we don't need to predict where to  find 
> information (e.g. many array attributes) but in the cases where  we do, 
> we could impose that "thread" of structure (aka an index) on a  YAML file.

The paradigm of "marshalling + indexes" is an interesting one indeed. But
when I think of queries, I think databases. That is how my interest in
KirbyBase arose.

So for now I will build some kind of solution on top of KB rather than
add my own indexing/querying scheme to YAML or something.


Hal