Monday, October 30, 2006

The db4o User I Met in the Phoenix Airport

Something funny happened to me while I was at the airport last week on the way home from Phoenix, Arizona. This guy who was at the boarding gate waiting for the same flight asked me if I worked for db4o because I was wearing my db4o t-shirt (as worn by Carl in the picture to the right). And I said "yes, do you know it?". He said he uses it!

So we got talking and he said they generally use it for development and rapid prototyping, and when it's ready, they actually outsource the work to India to convert it to TopLink (create all the mappings and database schema) for production. An interesting use of db4o that just goes to show that it sure helps with productivity.

It was really great to meet a random db4o user and to see how they are using it. I guess I'll be wearing my shirt more often. Ummm, Christof, could i get a 2 week supply of db4o schwag? ;)

2 comments:

knocte said...

This is reason for me to think, again, that it would be absolutely awesome if db4o implemented a simple solution to allow quick switching from NHibernate to DB4O and viceversa.

For me, in my company we recently switched from ADO.NET+StoredProcedures to NHibernate, but switching now to DB4O is likely to be very difficult. Building a data layer architecture to allow switching from one to other with just a configuration parameter would be nice, but we don't have enough time to do it.

If, for example, db4o developed an NHibernate driver to use with this wonderful database, we could test and I could show all the advantages to my compagnions and bosses: speed, no need of mapping files, awesome productivity, etc.

If this idea is already being thought or implemented, please provide a link to the issue or tracker of the feature :)

Travis said...

Interesting idea. In theory, the basic functions like save()/set() and delete() would be pretty easy, I think the main problem would be querying since Hibernate has it's own query language and db4o has a completely different one.

But using Sql4o and wrapping it in a Hibernate Session could potentially work.

It's not being implemented though and would probably be best as a community contribution. Any volunteers?