Object-Relational Mapping

Definitions

1. A technique (and family of libraries such as Hibernate, SQLAlchemy, and Prisma) that maps database tables to classes and rows to object instances, allowing developers to query and manipulate relational data using their programming language's object model instead of writing raw SQL.

   In plain English: A tool that lets programmers work with database records as regular objects in their code, without writing SQL by hand.

   Example: "The ORM made the simple CRUD fast to build, but we had to drop to raw SQL for the analytics queries because the generated joins were horrific."

Related Terms

• ORM
• Polymorphism
• Class
• Generic
• Interface
• Command Line Interface
• Fluent Interface
• Interface Segregation
• Key-Value Store
• Method Chaining
• Scalar
• Search Index
• Compute Unit