So... the .NET Rocks! discussion between myself and Ayende is now live on the Web , and I echo Ayende's blog post : although I have yet to hear the edited version, the real discussion was very interesting. A couple of commenters left some questions and comments on Ayende's blog, and Roy Osherove suggested that he'd like to see my responses, so... Congratulations on the discussion. I've listened to it once and intend to listen again, mainly because I had trouble figuring out exactlly what Ted was arguing for or against! In general, I'm against dogma of any form. In this particular debate, I'm against the idea that O/R-M can solve all your problems for you without asking, a viewpoint that's particularly widespread in the Java community and a growing one in the .NET community. O/R-M can get you some of the way there, but it's not capable of "closing the loop", per se, to completely solve all of the issues involved. Anyone who suggests that it can is either lying or trying to sell you something. Ted really lost the plot, however, when he started advocating db4o as a good solution. I've spent a good few (too many) years in the object database space and they're just a nightmare when it comes to querying and reporting on your data. Implemeinting this sort of solution just moves the dual schema problem out to your databases. I wasn't aware there was a "plot" that we were trying to follow. :-) Moreover, I *do* see the OODBMS approach (of which, I am most familiar with db4o and to a lesser degree Versant, no endorsement implied) as a good solution to store objects into, particularly when compared against an O/R-M solution, for those scenarios where the stored form of the data is not a visible concern. In other words, if your application sees persistent storage as a implementation issue, and the actual format of the stored data is not intended to be visible outside of your application boundaries, then the OODBMS is a very viable solution. As to querying and reporting, the querying story is much more approachable now given db4o's "Native Queries" approach (which is supposedly being applied as the standard for a future OODBMS-wide standard), but reporting is still something of a mess, if you ask me, largely not because of anythiing intrinsic in the OODBMS space itself, but the fact that there is no standard OODBMS-based reporting tool. (Like it or hate it, Crystal Reports did a lot to solidify the presence of the relational database in the IT world.) I recall being on the
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