That is really bad ideological myopia there. He refused to consider alternatives (for which I would adovcate functional design or something like sqlalchemy). "

That is really bad ideological myopia there. He refused to consider alternatives (for which I would adovcate functional design or something like sqlalchemy). "Actually I think this is an inevitable consequence of using a relational database - you either have to make your in-memory model more relational, or you complicate your mapping code." No its an inevitable consequence of trying to think with an object-oriented type system to describe a set-based data collection! In other-words the problem is attempting ORM: he's begging the question! I would expect better from Fowler, but it does go to show the futher into an ideology you get (heavily design-patterned OOP in fowler's case) the more you see design and programming problems as problem with OOP rather than anything more fundamental.