What is object relational mapping? ORM explained!

What is object relational mapping? Why do we use it? Object Relational Mapping or ORM for short is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems using object-oriented programming languages. Using it, you can store, retrieve, update and delete information stored in a relational database directly from an object-oriented programming language!

It is commonly implemented as a software design layer that translates between your object oriented data model and relational model at the database level, most commonly this layer is implemented using an existing library such as 4DFLib, Hibernate, Sequelize, Doctrine, SQLAlchemy and many others.

This video is part of a 2 part series that introduces ORM through a practical approach of actually implementing it. It is followed by a 3 video tutorial you can follow using 4DFLib, a free and open source JVM based ORM library designed and built by myself. This ORM has 2 focuses:
1. Automatically managing data over time (create and manages history).
2. Simplicity and use and API.

Step by step tutorial on using ORM with 4DFLib:

What is 4DFLib? 4DF is a Library that manages your applications interaction with the database, providing ORM, database abstraction and 4DF or 4th Dimensional Form data which means that all data is saved in every state in every table over time. Nothing is ever deleted or updated, and you do not need to anything to implement this behavior, it happens automatically. It also provides a basic service layer for accessing your data through time, allowing you to retrieve current and historical data and filtering by time ranges.

Book used in this course: Garcia-Molina, Hector. Database systems: the complete book. Pearson Education India, 2008.

[streetchronicles]

Thank you, Ive always used ORMs and this is helping me get a deeper understanding.

[Noodles]

Wow, thank you! What's interesting is how coding concepts can generally be difficult to understand (or teach I'd imagine) when it's mainly explained verbally, but everything you said here was easy to follow / very well put, informative and extremely helpful. (Coming from someone who's only a month into a coding bootcamp and prepping for Active Record) Liked and subbed halfway through!

[KennyCarter]

This was just the video I was looking for! Thanks for the explanations!