Let's say that you have a row with a number of child rows in some other table. You might
- not be interested in the child rows at all, in which case it's a waste to retrieve them at all
- be interested in only one, in which case it should be retrieved when you want it
- be interested in all of them, so it's best to retrieve them all immediately.
Both DBIC and RoseDB support the ability for the user to specify how they want to handle those kinds of details. And, this is just one example. You'll need to read the documentation to really get an idea of what's possible.
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?