Simon Willison’s Weblog

Object persistence

8th November 2002

Simon Brunning talks about persistence, and how much more complicated it is now that objects are involved. The best explanation I’ve seen of how objects and relational databases can be used together was in Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, but now that the book has been published he has removed the online version. IBM’s DeveloperWorks has a new article up describing persistence management in Python, which talks in details about Python’s native serialization method (pickling) but only mentions ZODB in passing. I agree with Simon—object databases just don’t seem as elegant a solution as RDBMSs. Object databases may provide persistence but they don’t seem nearly as powerful as relational databases when it comes to flexibility of accessing data.