From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-10-18T03:00:44+09:00
Subject: Re: recommendations for working with PostgreSQL

On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 02:37:39AM +0900, Thomas Adam wrote:
> On 17/10/2007, Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'm not necessarily looking for ORM, though now that I think about it I
> > can't help but wonder if every single programmatic interface between Ruby
> > and a relational database might qualify in some manner as ORM (since
> > "everything is an object" in Ruby).  In the Perl world, I'd tend to use
> 
> But then, just because the language you're using means everything is
> an object, does not mean to say that when you connect to a database
> and start pulling stuff out of it that what you get is ORM.  ORM is an
> interface your application would define for itself, mapping to the
> underlying tables/views/whatever in the database.
> 
> Ruby makes this easier in that you could just (at a crude level) map
> an object you define to have properties, behaviour and scope of the
> underlying tables, etc., in the database.  Sometimes there is merit to
> that -- and indeed, coming into this are things like patterns (the
> factory pattern in particular is useful in ORM scenarios.)

Thus, my "in some manner" qualification.  The comment about all
programmatic DB interfaces in Ruby being ORMs was really a throw-away,
not exactly meant to be taken in strictly literal fashion.  Sorry if that
wasn't clear.


> 
> > DBI for all things database-y, and was wondering what the preferred
> > approach would be in the Ruby world especially in the case of PostgreSQL.
> 
> Having written numerous libraries (well, OK, two) in both perl and
> ruby, I can honestly say that whilst it's somewhat "easier" in perl
> (you're not forced to go down the abstracted route of ORM design) you
> lose a lot of functionality -- the scope of what you can write in Perl
> diminishes since the interface subroutines rarely map in an ORM way
> [1].  Look into it heavily with Ruby -- it will make life easier.

Thanks for the advice.  I shall (look into it heavily).


> 
> [1] Anyone who things writing OO Perl is a good thing for this; think
> again.  OO perl is just broken.

I certainly don't disagree much.  It's not any more broken, really, than
OOP in languages like C++, but they're pretty broken in that regard too.
Just my opinion, of course.  In general, I love Perl -- but in terms of
its OO constructs, I do not love it.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Patrick J. LoPresti: "Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1)
Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk
quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"