6 Reasons for Not Using db4o
Written on Monday, January 21, 2008 by Edwin Sanchez
Don’t misinterpret the title. Db4o is such a good product. I admit that I was skeptical to use it at first. But once you tried using it, you don’t want to stop. You may know other reasons from people you know why they are still not using db4o. Are you one of these? Read on. You will not use db4o unless:
- You want to take it slow. If you want to spend time mapping your objects to relational counterparts, that’s it for you. Even if there are ORM tools, you still need some time that a native ODBMS will not require.
- Your faith is in RDBMS. Some developers I know have been “doctrinated” that RDBMS is better and ODBMS is not good. We can not blame people thinking that after what happened to history. Added to this, there is this tendency of sticking to “What’s In? In is cool” and sticking to the majority. They think the vast majority is way cooler. And this vast majority is the RDBMS crowd. But it’s high time to look at the products today, especially db4o. The product is promising and there are thousands and thousands of members in the community trusting the product and the company behind it.
- You want more work and less implementations. Coding for queries, inserts, updates and deletes are very simple in db4o. This will mean more time for features to be implemented than spending time mapping objects to relational counterparts. More implemented features means good for us developers and it equates to good employee performance and satisfied customers.
- You want more time in your work and less with love ones. I remember the days when my colleagues and friends used to say “No time for love”. I was single back then and I’m spending less time with my girlfriend (now my wife) because of lots and lots of things to code. Now I have a 3-year old daughter and I need even more time for love ones. If your development tools can cut development time and your database does not require more coding, then you’ll have more quality time for your family. Db4o made my database tasks simpler.
- “But you can do away with ORM and map your table fields straight to your user interface, right?” Before I answer that, I can see that there is a group who prefers RDBMS and ORM Tools. On the other side is a crowd who prefers to use ODBMS like db4o. The main goal of both groups is to adhere with object-oriented design and principles. This is not bad. Object-oriented principles have been proven to be advantageous many times. However, there is a third crowd who will neither do ORM nor objects. They say that the overhead of doing ORM will be reduced by deviating object-oriented rules. That is, do your SQL homework, call it in C# or any language and map it to your visual controls. Actually, you can do this in Visual Studio without too much coding effort. Just drag the data controls and visual controls to your form or web page, set the properties and that’s it. You have a running application! Just to answer the question, yes, you can escape from ORM and its overhead and map it straight to visual controls. But why not solve the ORM issues by using a native object-oriented database like db4o? You adhered to object-oriented principles without hurting performance and you got rid of the impedance mismatch at the same time.
- You just don’t know db4o. When I started working with db4o, I told my team about it. Then I told my boss. I talked about it with other developers I know. I even tried a demo from one of my projects. And they think it’s cool. I was allowed by my boss to look into it. But you know what? When I talked to people about it the first time, they never heard of it. Knowing these reasons now, I think there is some lack of promotions in certain areas like mine. I don’t know with others. Starters can always download and try it out and read (thoroughly) the documentation. You won’t regret you had. Then, we can help by telling friends about it. Write something about it and tell the world. Contribute codes and help newcomers cope up.
As usual, this is just to share my thoughts on my favorite database. I’ve been using it in a Client-Server environment so you may have a different experience than mine. But generally speaking, you can think of the thoughts presented here.