Concerning the streamlining and marketing effects. I think noone is marketing the Object oriented approach in the datamodel. I think it does not make sense to market it either, as this would clearly show the break of technologies (object oriented datamodel on a relational database using an imperative language).
Technology wise, well, streamlining sounds great, but who is going to do it and will it make development easier or harder ? Not to talk about migration scripts. Maybe something we could look for in Release 5.0 {the branch with streamlined datamodell and full webservice support interfacing and providing .NET services as well as Java ONE (or was this something else, I sometimes get lost in all this marketing...)
As for TCL vs. PL/SQL. Only select what you need from the database using as few queries as possible. And try to stay away from PL/SQL while doing it. Reasoning:
- Performance. On aiesec.net, the database is the bottleneck, especially the PL/SQL functions sometimes take a nasty long time. But how do you run the database on multiple servers to distribute the load? Distributing AOLserver is not a problem (and you dont have to deal with fancy caching mechanisms, if the database is not the bottleneck anymore).
- Performance II. TCL 8.4 got a performance boost. This means some queries (I think the if statement and the string compare, to name a few) have been made faster by roughly 50%. Looking forward to AOLserver 4.0 for that.
