Francia - MongoDB and PHP

There was only one problem. PHPwhich started as a templating languagematured and gradually embraced objects. PHP was being used in more complex applications and the language consistently changed to meet these ever-increasing demands. The practice of writing raw SQL queries in template files quickly became unacceptable (some say it was never acceptable). As the problems became more and more complex, tools were written to solve the constantly growing trouble of PHP using objects (or arrays) and MySQL (and the other relational databases) using tables, rows, and columns.

This isnt a problem specific to PHP. For decades, people have built tools and libraries to automate the process of translating objects to relational data structures. The most popular set is called Object Relational Mappers (ORMs). ORMs were built to solve the problem of SQL. Their sales pitch is: use an ORM because it masks all the nasty details of the datastore, so all you ever need to touch is your friendly PHP objects. Although tools emerged that did a reasonable job of making good on that promise, they never really worked perfectly. First, you always needed to remember that there was a relational database behind these objects that spoke in terms of tables, rows, and columns. Second, these ORMs came at a high cost. They added a lot of complexity and overhead to applications and persisted only a subset of SQLs features. As they developed, it quickly became the case that learning an ORM was far more time-consuming than learning SQL in the first place. It is sufficient to say that although the ORMs largely fixed the problems of SQL, they brought with them the problems of ORMs.