Tangram::Sucks(3p)

NAME
Tangram::Sucks - what there is to be improved in Tangram

DESCRIPTION
Tangram has taken a concept very familiar to programmers in Java land to its logical completion.

This document is an attempt by the coders of Tangram to summarise the major problems that are inherant in the design, describe cases for which the Tangram metaphor does not work well, and list long standing TO-DO items.

  DESIGN CAVEATS

query language does not cover all SQL expressions
    Whilst there is no underlying fault with the query object metaphor per se, there are currently lots of queries that cannot be expressed in current versions of Tangram, and adding new parts to the language is not easy.

some loss of encapsulation with queries
    It could be said this is not a problem. After all, adding properties to a schema of an object is akin to declaring them as "public".

    Some people banter on about data access patterns, which the Tangram schema represents. But OO terms like that are usually treated as buzzwords anyway.

  HARD PROBLEMS

partial column select
    This optimisation has some serious dangers associated with it.

    It could either be

no support for SQL UPDATE
    It may be possible to write a version of "$storage->select()" that does this, which would look something like:

      $storage->update
          ( $r_object,
            set => [ $r_object->{bar} == $r_object->{baz} + 2 ],
            filter => ($r_object->{frop} != undef)
          );

no explicit support for re-orgs
    The situation where you have a large amount of schema reshaping to do, with a complex enough data structure can turn into a fairly difficult problem.

    It is possible to have two Tangram stores with different schema and simply load objects from one and put them in the other - however the on-demand autoloading combined with the automatic insertion of unknown objects will result in the entire database being loaded into core if it is sufficiently interlinked.

replace SQL expression core
    The whole SQL expression core needs to be replaced with a SQL abstraction module that is a little better planned. For instance, there should be placeholders used in a lot more places where the code just sticks in an integer etc.

support for `large' collections
    Where it is impractical or undesirable to load all of a collection into memory, when you are adding a member and then updating the container, it should be possible to

    This could actually be achieved with a new Tangram::Type.

  MISSING FEATURES

concise query expressions
    For simple selects, this is too long:

      ...

non-ID joins
tables with no primary key
tables with multi-column primary keys
tables with auto_increment keys
tables without a `type' column
tables with custom `type' columns
tables with implicit (presence) `type' columns
fully symmetric relationships
    back-refs are read-only.

bulk inserts
    Inserting lots of similar objects should be more efficient. Right now it generates a new STH for each object.

`empty subclass' schema support
    You should not need to explicitly add new classes to a schema if a superclass of them is already in the schema.