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Is Functional to Relational mapping easier than Object to Relational?

Asked 2008-10-20T12:02:55.523
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Object-relational mapping has been well discussed, including on here. I have experience with a few approaches and the pitfalls and compromises. True resolution seems like it requires changes to the OO or relational models themselves.

If using a functional language, does the same problem present itself? It seems to me that these two paradigms should fit together better than OO and RDBMS. The idea of thinking in sets in an RDBMS seems to mesh with the automatic parallelism that functional approaches seem to promise.

Does anyone have any interesting opinions or insights? What's the state of play in the industry?

database orm functional-programming rdbms
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I'd think that, as Sam mentioned, if the DB should be updated, the same concurrency issues have to be faced as with OO world. The functional nature of the program could maybe be even a little more problematic than the object nature because of the state of data, transactions etc of the RDBMS.

But for reading, the functional language could be more natural with some problem domains (as it seems to be regardless of the DB)

The functional<->RDBMS mapping should have no big differences to OO<->RDMBS mappings. But I think that that depends a lot on what kind of data types you want to use, if you want to develop a program with a brand new DB schema or to do something against a legacy DB schema, etc..

The lazy fetches etc for associations for example could probably be implemented quite nicely with some lazy evaluation -related concepts. (Even though they can be done quite nicely with OO also)

Edit : With some googling I found HaskellDB (SQL library for Haskell) - that could be worth trying?

answered 2008-10-20T12:27:50.840

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