[orm-devel] Automatic table modufication (was: orm)

[Eric Walstad]

Diedrich Vorberg wrote:
>>Not to chase you away, or anything, but I think you might want to take a
>>look at the GNUe project, as well as ORM: it's targetted more at the 'all
>>singing, all dancing' sort of system your talking about. My understanding
>>of Deidrich's vision/goals for ORM is that it's biggest virtue is in it's
>>light weight - it's a membrane, not an entire layer. I'd be concerned about
>>blowing it up with functions like database schema management  - it'd lose
>>it's lightness, I'm afraid.
> 
> 
> I can see the point Ross' is making here. ORM is supposed to be a
> smart helper not a grown up middleware framework. However, depending
> on how sophisticated the table modification mechanism is supposed to
> be, it might not be very hard to write and it might not even outgrow 
> its writer.

I'd stay away from the idea of making orm do schema management.  My fear 
would be that adding this kind of feature set would make orm bloated and 
cumbersome.  I also think that schema management is best left to the db 
supplier (or other third parties that specialize in it).  I generally 
put a lot of thought and time into designing a schema that will 
efficiently model the problem domain.  Actually building the tables 
takes up only a small portion of this time.  I really *hate* changing 
the schema once the entities/tables have been created - the ability to 
have orm do it for me doesn't sound very interesting.

Best regards,

Eric.