Bleah.

First, for some reason, “they” thought we cared about the multiple possible underlying representations for our strings (cue the assembly level objections about how this can save 5 cycles and a rant about bloat in modern applications).

Now, for apparently similar reasons, “they” seem to think we care about the multiple possible underlying representations for our entities (cue the relational objections about how this can save 5 cycles and a rant about the bloat of object oriented programming).

The “they” in question, as we both know, are the hooded figures living on the dark side of the moon, spending every waking minute conspiring against us to thwart any opportunity we might have for a Real Life.

/Mats

A common theme throughout all modern application architectures is a need to transform data from one form to another to have it in the right form for the task at hand. Today’s applications sport a number of data transformers. A common transformation usually encapsulated as a proprietary data access layer inside applications is designed to minimize the impedance mismatch between application objects and relational rows. However, other mappings to navigate object-xml, and relational-xml exist. This impedance mismatch is not unique to applications. As SQL Server has evolved as a product, it has had to add a number of these modeling and mapping mechanisms across the services it provides within the product. Most of these mappings are produced in a point-to-point fashion and each requires a different means to describe the point-to-point transformation.

http://www.microsoft.com/indonesia/msdn/nxtgenda.aspx

Now the real question is: does not having a Real Life bring the world anything in terms of app maintenance or should we just skip all the conversion and start pumping stuff directly from the HttpServletRequest into the database .