[russell]

Neward's article is here: http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Compute... There is a post elsewhere on HN that links to the wrong article. You have to skip forward a bit to get beyond the history of the Vietnam War to get to the meat.

The gist of the post is that there is a fundamental impedance mismatch between OO and Relational. If you try to apply inheritance to relational databases you get an unholy quagmire. My experience is that this is true. You get a rat's nest of tables and unwieldy joins.

There are more problems with schema ownership, dual schemas, and refactoring.

Coding Horror lifts the summary and leaves behind all the argument

[wyw]

Yes, a mismatch exists and can lead to compromises as you try to use the object paradigm to glue the two layers together. But the benefits are also undeniable, primarily that of productivity gained during development by not having to concern yourself with the job of mapping types between the two layers.