Object-relational mapping articles and products

Object-relational mapping is used to map object-oriented programming objects to relational databases managed by Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and other relational database managers (RDBMSs). This site provides facts about object-relational mapping products, architecture problem-solving, and direction in product comparison and selection.

Object-relational mapping products are designed to work well with object programming languages such as C#, C++, and Java. Database objects appear as programming language objects. Often, the interface for object-relational mapping products is the same as the interface for object-oriented databases.

Object-relational mapping products should be be used when you want to take advantage of transparent persistence and use an RDBMS. An RDBMS may be required because:

	The data already resides in one or more RDBMSs
	The data is new, but there are technical or political reasons for using an RDBMS

An object-relational mapping product will likely reduce your programming code and, through caching, improve performance over using an embedded SQL or call-level interface such as JDBC or ODBC when using an RDBMS. The performance cost of using RDBMSs with objects can be reduced because most object-relational mapping products provide transparent persistence with object programming languages and caching. More on these topics can be found in the articles mentioned in the next section.

Other terms used for object-relational mapping include: OR mapping and ORM .

Articles

Using object-relational mapping instead of JDBC or ODBC can reduce your development time and improve your performance. Interested in how these products work? Want to know when you should consider using these products? What are some architectures that take advantage of these products yet preserve your existing database investment? These articles provide answers to these questions and more. Check out the articles on object-relational mapping.

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