The relational database plays a number of important roles in an enterprise application. Most commonly, it's a data storage and group collaboration system. But it's also a key component in enterprise integration and evolution. In other words, unless you're starting on a brand new project, you're stuck with what you've got, and any new languages or environments you plan to adopt need to work within the constraints of your existing data architecture.

In this presentation, we'll look at the relational database access options available in today's common languages and environments, including .NET / CLR, Java / JVM, Ruby, Python, and PHP. Patrick will focus on the idioms, features and practices for different environments, including some code samples. He will discuss how to decide between ORM / ActiveRecord and straight SQL, and when to consider serializing object graphs into BLOBs rather than performing any mapping at all.