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pcplantdb - [pcplantdb] Object oriented model reprise

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  • From: John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [pcplantdb] Object oriented model reprise
  • Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 23:02:01 +0000

Aloha,

Can you provide a layman's explanation of ORM with MySQL and what the default/alternative would be?

What are the advantages offered by ORM as the object-oriented approach?

I'll leave these to Chad - he is more familiar with details of this stuff than I am.

Whhat does object-oriented mean in the ocntext of what we are doing and how does it fiffer from non-OO methods?

There's been a lot of posts on this already - check the archives for a reprise.

IMO an object model for our project is much more appropriate than a relational-database model.

Plant objects (stored in an object DB) would contain information about themselves and ways ('methods', meaning essentially bits of code) to share than information.
This is essentially what real-world plants do - they 'know' about themselves and communicate with other entities in a variety of ways - colors and scents to attract pollinators and/or repel predators, root exudates to attract symbiotic micro-fauna or scare off predatory micro-fauna, and so on.

In a relational-DB model, plants are abstracted as tables of information 'about' plants, with columns identifying general attributes/characteristics of plants and rows containing specific information on particular plants.
Instead of simply asking a plant object about itself in various ways, queries have to be constructed to de-abstract the abstractions created in making the tables, in order to extract the desired information 'about' the desired plant or plants.

Either approach can be made to do what we want.
I think the relational databse approach will get really really nastily complex and hard to work with as we add complexity to both tables and queries.

The object-oriented approach just seems way more appropriate - simpler, more like what we are trying to model.
We are already a culture addicted to abstraction; I think plant objects in an OO database are less an abstraction than relational database tables full of bits of data about plants.


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John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
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Whole Systems Design Services
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john@eco-living.net
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