[Catalyst] DBIC and RDBO compared (was: Choosing the right ORM)

[John Siracusa]

On 12/1/05, Phil Mitchell <phil at 2people.org> wrote:
> Thanks for this great overview! You don't mention anything wrt
> inheritance of model classes -- probably it's too obvious to mention.
> But as someone w/o a lot of ORM experience, I'm wondering how these
> handle situations outside the one class/one table model --
> specifically, where you have an inheritance tree that's all based on
> the same table, and where there's a signficant amount of implicit
> self-joins. I do this now in CDBI using has_a/has_many, but have run
> into as-yet-unexplained breakdown of inheritance of triggers and such,
> which I solve with ugly workarounds.

AFAIK, neither DBIC nor RDBO do anything in particular with respect to the
various inheritance schemes.  That said, any technique you use in CDBI
should be applicable in both RDBO and DBIC.

I plan to formalize one or more inheritance techniques in a future release
of RDBO.  That'll basically involve adding examples to the test suite and
tutorial and maybe making a few "helper" code changes, if necessary.  It
depends on what kinds of inheritance I'm going to support.  I haven't
decided yet.

-John