objects and sets

Friday, May 18th, 2007

So, getting somewhere with TurboGears, although I’ve been banging my head a little against SQLObject.  While it’s indubitably a nice tool if you’re looking for an object persistence mechanism, it can get a bit frustrating if you actually want to treat your relational database like a relational database.  There seem to be a lot of tools available that promise to shield you from dealing with SQL, but generally speaking I don’t want to be shielded.  The strength of the relational model is not that you can rapidly access a big list of data elements, but that you can slice, join and view this data in a huge variety of ways.

Specifically I’ve been trying to implement a many-to-many relation where the intermediate table has attributes, and then do a join across this table filtered by these attributes.  Trivial in SQL, and frustratingly difficult in SQLObject.  In fact I’ve shelved it for now while I concentrate on other issues.

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