ORM, noSQL and Vietnam

Sean Corfield will be giving us a sneak peak of this presentation he will be delivering at cf.objective() 2013.

In 2004, Ted Neward famously coined the phrase "Object-Relational mapping is the Vietnam of our industry". Jeff Atwood reprised the theme in 2006 in his blog post "Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/06/object-relational-mapping-is-the-vietnam-of-computer-science.html)". With ColdFusion 9 and Railo 3.3, CFML developers got access to ORM and there was much rejoicing! But is ORM all it's cracked up to be? Is it a silver bullet - or just another step away from the simplicity that CFML was founded on?

There's an inherent impedance mismatch between our in-memory object models and the table-based relational model. If there's no silver bullet, what's all the fuss about "noSQL"? How do document stores like MongoDB compare to relational databases? Which battles are worth fighting in this war?

What will we cover?

Problems with ORM that have attracted the "Vietnam" criticisms Why document stores can be a better match to typical object models How typical SQL operations map to MongoDB query commands Schema design considerations for MongoDB Options for using MongoDB with CFML

For those of you new to BACFUG, Sean was the manager of our group for several years. Here is his bio:

Sean Corfield used to build compilers, virtual machines, databases and telecom systems but eventually got a real job building web applications. After eight years of ANSI C++ Standardization and a decade of web development with JVM-based languages, he finally found his first love again - functional programming - and now he writes Clojure almost every day.

Hope everyone can make it!
-Carl