The Problem: Impedance Mismatch

This problem is one of the most underestimated problems in enterprise Java applications. The problem is far more complex and labor-intensive than simply reading from and writing to a database because:

• The database world contains stored procedures, tables, rows, columns, and foreign keys

• The object-oriented Java world contains object references, business rules, complex relationships, and inheritance

• Runtime considerations such as locking, caching, and sequencing must be managed

• The solution must be performance-oriented. It must be efficient, scalable, and allow sufficient flexibility in defining the runtime behavior to enhance application performance.

The problem of bridging these fundamentally different technologies is known as the object-relational impedance mismatch.