OSCon.2k5.3.OR-Mapping

Was a pretty cool talk, although wasn’t really rocket science for me, but probably was for a lot of app developers. Basically he talked about how to use PostgreSQL and SQLite to create updatable views (using rules and/or triggers) to make your database match your application object class structure. Of course I know you can do this, cause it’s the type of stuff you do inside a database. App programmers probably don’t, and in fairness it would be hard for them to do it, cause rules can be somewhat complex things to work on if you’re not used to them. It’s the kind of thing you probably should hire someone to do as a PostgreSQL DBA within your organization. Still it was pretty cool to see someone actually implementing this stuff, and also cool to see two different implementations. By the way, not to shamelessly plug, but I in the php/pg book due out in october there is a chapter talking about rules and views where we walk through several examples for doing updatable views on both single and multiple table instances, might be worth checking out if your into it. Incdentally, best moment of the talk was at the end where he did a quick but on my$ql and what it would need to be able to implement this, and after some chatter, someone said “thier general response on new features is send us a patch and pay us and we’ll put it in, other wise suffer”, to which David responded “but using PostgreSQL isn’t suffering”. That actually drew applause from the entire room… too cool.