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Can somebody explain to me the difference between using an OODB to back your web app and using a web framework like Rails or Django?I know the actual implementa

• jrockway 18y ago
  There isn't much difference if you only work with single elements and sets of single elements. (Imagine, a user with a username and password; and the set of all users.) Things become more complex when you want to store arbitrary data structures. A simple example is a doubly-linked list. This is easy to represent in memory, and it's easy to represent in a relational database, but it's not particularly easy to translate between the two representations. With an object database, the in-memory structure is the persistent structure, so there is no translation. Anything you have in memory can be put in the database. (Most implementations let you index and query this data, as well, and provide you with opportunities to create indexes that would be difficult or impossible to represent with a relational database management system.) Also, a key feature of OOP is polymorphism, which the relational model does not handle elegantly. Object databases handle it fine.