Relational Database

A Relational database is the heart and soul of any business that deals with data. Because RDBMSs are the dominant persistent storage technology it is critical that all IT professionals understand at least the basics of RDBMSs, the challenges surrounding the technology, and when it is appropriate to use them. Relational databases have been around for quite a while now and have not been substituted by some other technology but rather have grown into more advanced systems with more features, better performance and management. The huge success of the relational database is heavily attributed to SQL.

There are several “advanced features” of a relational database that developers learn once they’ve familiarized themselves with basic CRUD functionality. Each of these features is so important, and often so complex, that they require their own articles to cover them properly. Orasis focuses on Object storage. To store an object in a relational database you need to flatten it – create a data representation of the object – because relational databases only store data. To retrieve the object you would read the data from the database and then create the object, often referred to as restoring the object, based on that data. Although storing objects in a relational database sounds like a simple thing to achieve, practice shows that it isn’t. This is due to the object-relational impedance mismatch, the fact that relational database technology and object technology are based on different underlying theories, a topic discussed in The Object-Relational (O/R) Impedance Mismatch.

To store objects successfully in relational databases, Orasis provide a visual toolset that allows creation of Mappings with a power SQL designer and an Object Mapping control. To see the powerful Orasis Mapping Studio IDE and how it helps you build a maintainable database access tier please watch the videos on the main site. The focus here is the relational database and how Orasis allows you to visualize your tables and build powerful queries using the Query designer. The Query designer is an entire system by itself but here we will briefly discuss its powerful features and value that both developers and database administrators can gain.

    1. With an integrated SQL editor you can visually build queries directly in the IDE or simply cut & paste them from your editor of choice.

    2. The query designer automatically determines relationships between tables and creates appropriate joins for them.

    3. Unions are managed from within the union panel at the corner of the visual query builder pane. You can build a query containing several unions in a few clicks!