[Catalyst] DBIC and RDBO compared (was: Choosing the right ORM)

[Perrin Harkins]

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 18:47 -0500, John Siracusa wrote:
> UNIQUE DBIC FEATURES
> 
> * Class::DBI compatibility layer.
> 
> * ADO support in the loader.
> 
> * MSSQL and Oracle primary key detection and configuration.
> 
> * Supports arbitrary-depth explicit joins.
> 
> * Supports arbitrary-depth client-side cascaded delete.
> 
> * The list of columns fetched during a SELECT (with or without JOINs)  
> can be be specified exactly.

One important feature which Class::DBI supports (and I assume DBIC
supports this as well) is the use of arbitrary SQL to fetch objects.
Some database operations are just much better expressed in SQL than in a
complex perl data structure, especially if you want access to vendor-
specific extensions like the Oracle tree stuff.  With Class::DBI, you
can write some hairy SQL query and let it do all the drudge work to turn
the resulting rows into objects.  This is a key feature for me.

- Perrin