Re^2: Is Perl Truly an Object Oriented Language?

To clarify the aspects of both types of databases a bit: I'm using an OO database at work stuffed with genomics data based on the AceDB database. The problem with object-oriented databases is that they (at least not AceDB) don't support relationships except when defined in the objects themselves. Let me explain: suppose you want to store the names of villages and the persons living in those villages:

in a relational database, you would create 2 tables: 'villages' and 'persons'. A truly relational way to create links between the two, would be to create a third table 'villages2persons', which holds only 2 columns: one with the IDs from villages and one with the IDs from persons.
in a OO database, there are objects from the class 'village' and objects from the class 'person'. The problem starts when making links: within every village object, a list of IDs from persons has to be kept AND in every person object, a village ID should be added. (Of course, there are workarounds, but then you're distracting from the OO setup of the database) Ergo: same information is stored twice. Ergo again: _very_ high change to create inconsistencies when updating data and stuff.

Comment on Re^2: Is Perl Truly an Object Oriented Language?

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Re^3: Is Perl Truly an Object Oriented Language? by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 03, 2004 at 13:09 UTC
Of course, you could solve this problem in the same way you solve it with a relational database, by introducing the `Residency` object (you called it `villages2persons`), and then navigating `Village->Residency->Person` to get at the persons of a village, but that way, you've just replicated the relational model onto the object database - which most likely isn't what was intended.	[reply] [d/l]