What are alternatives to standard ORM in a data access layer?
- by swampsjohn
We're all familiar with basic ORM with relational databases: an object corresponds to a row and an attribute in that object to a column (or some slight variation), though many ORMs add a lot of bells and whistles.
I'm wondering what other alternatives there are (besides raw access to the database or whatever you're working with). Alternatives that just work with relational databases would be great, but ones that could encapsulate multiple types of backends besides just SQL (such as flat files, RSS, NoSQL, etc.) would be even better. I'm more interested in ideas rather than specific implantations and what languages/platforms they work with, but please link to anything you think is interesting.