At the company I work for we’ve struggled for many weeks with using a commercial library for object to relational database mapping. It is supposed to hide the details of the database, make changes to the database easy (i.e. a change to a table doesn’t alter the code), and get caching of data as well. It has definitely not worked as we expected and in the end we are going to have to replace it.
Apparently in this day and age using simple SQL to access your data is just too arcane to speak of so you have to have some kind of tool to map your objects to a database. Two of the ones we are looking at are both from Apache:
I’m very interested to see whether either of these will make the job of moving data into and out of an application any easier.