LegitimateSounding.com

All databases consist of a handful of operations: Create, Read, Update, Delete, and sometimes Scan. If this sounds a lot like reading and writing files on a disk, it is. At their core, databases need access to both data and metadata. An operating system provides this in a very basic form of a filesystem. As a simple approach to building a database, the reliance on a filesystem is key, as it provides a lot of metadata, and allows us to move forward with one less layer to deal with.

It's silly, really: rebuilding one of the things that has been considered a "solved problem" for a number of years. But, I've always felt that in order to understand a problem fully, one must understand the problems that those who came before us were trying to solve; to take a trip through their design decisions, and to understand why they chose the solutions that they did.

An ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) has become a near-essential tool of software development. Whether you agree with the model or not, it has become ubiquitous. So, what happens when your ORM is so generic that it can't actually deal with the advanced features of your database? Problem: impedance mismatch. How bad can it be? Really bad, and the workarounds can be just as bad, if not worse.