And I realize that you are not trying to replace RDBs, just building a nicer interface to them. I am just concerned that some of the nice properties are lost in the process. I think my main concern comes from seeing people create databases, by automatically generating tables from OO-classes. They invariably ends up with something not nearly as nice, as if they had constructed the database in a more traditional fashion.
To summarize, what you propose is cool. Just do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Hi Mad. Maybe I want to replace a RDBMS. But this will cost. You can fire arbitrary SQL statements in no time at RDBMS. You can't do things like that that easy using a haskell (in memory) only solutions. So SQL wins here at the moment if you want to be productive. If you read the .pdf I posted you saw that SQLAlchemy is that coold that a) you can use the shortcut style and define objects and tables at the same time but you als can b) define both layers independent of each other. And: Most applications today don't have to scale to an extend forcing you to move all logic into a database system. If you can one request a sec on a web application .. That's already very much for most small shop system. (I'm not talking about Amazon or ebay or such!) I'm talking about customers who want some more customizations as you can do with oscommerce. My main purpose was to see wether someone else would be interested in spending more effort into such a solution. Anyway I have still have to do some other work before I can jump into such a project. And Mad, I think you already know that RDBMS are not the best solution because it's very hard to ask a RDBMS wether a query retuns a nullable value or not. And that makes a huge difference wether you have to use a unsafeFromNull like function all the time or not. Time will tell how much energy I can spend on such this topic in the future. cu all Marc Weber