BeanDB.org

Relational Algebra might be thought of by many as the complicated maths behind Relational Databases, which are already complicated enough by themselves. Fact is that a lot of the complexity in so-called Relational Databases comes from the parts where they do not follow Relational Algebra at all.

The name "Relational Algebra" comes from it being an algebraic structure over relations. "Algebraic structure" means nothing more (nor less) than a formal specification of a set of things and a set of operations on those things. As a programmer one can think of an algebra as data structures and procedures.

The project started out of frustration about the current state of persistence in the Java world.

One of the main issues is that access to a relational database requires either mixing Java and SQL or using an object-relational mapping (ORM) tool, such as Hibernate.

The problem with the former approach is that it results in hard to read and thus hard to maintain code. Java code gets intermixed with SQL in strings, where indenting can follow only one layout and two levels (and types) of escapes get mixed.

The problem with the ORM approach is that it usually requires additional configuration and in larger scenarios it can be hard to understand how Java, the ORM tool and the RDBMS interact. In the worst case a programmer might work harder on understanding the mixture of technologies than on the actual business problem.

This part of the website is going to describe the philosophy behind BeanDB and how it drills down to the actual API design.

This website has just been set up. More information will hopefully come soon.