Object Relational Mappings at SDForum

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to software development during the past two decades, you’ll have noticed two things:

• Object-oriented programming is here to stay
• Relational databases are here to stay

If you’ve been a software developer for any length of time during the past two decades, you probably noticed the problem:

• Object Models of data and Relational Models of data don’t play well together.

The so-called Object-Relational Mapping Problem has been a thorn in our side for over two decades now.

This month, SDForum is providing both a world-class pundit AND coverage of a cutting-edge product. If you want to get up close and personal with the latest thinking, this month at SDForum is tailor-made for you.

First the pundit. Ted Neward is, without a doubt, one of the world’s pre-eminent experts in both .NET and J2EE. And he’s speaking at the Software Architecture and Modeling Sig on October 25. Here’s the abstract:

State Management: Shape and Storage: The insidious and slippery problem of storing objects to disk

No matter your language or platform, a large part of the time and energy required for modern enterprise development centers around managing the transition between transient (working) state and durable (stored) state. What exacerbates the problem even more is the fact that these two are often stored in different “shapes”–transient state is typically in objects, and durable state wants to be stored relationally, and it’s not trivial to map between them. If you consider the growing pervasiveness of XML services, now we have a third “shape”, that being a hierarchical form. We’ll talk about what makes this such an insidious and slippery problem, what tools are available to help address it, and mechanisms we have to avoid the problem in the first place.

Then, a week or so later, the Windows SIG is having a presentation on LINQ, which is just about the single most interesting development in computer language design since the Ruby guys invented closures. Here’s that abstract:

LINQ 101 – .NET Language Integrated Query

The LINQ Project is a codename for a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities. In this session we’ll cover some of the basics of LINQ, BLINQ, DLINQ and XLINQ.

(and before anyone points it out, yes I know. Closures weren’t invented by Rubyists. It was a joke).