Analysis of Different ORM Tools for Data Access Object Tier Generation: A Brief Study

Abstract

The Data Access Tier, also known as the Data Access Layer (DAL), is a specific tier within the 3-tier architecture or other software architectural patterns. The interaction between the application's business logic and the underlying data storage or database is managed by it. This pattern provides an abstraction layer that encapsulates the logic required to access and manipulate data in a data storage system. This paper demonstrates the related work that happened in the past regarding the generation of the data tier in between the business layer and the actual Database of the MVC/MVT architecture for faster software development. This study will go further into the imbalance of impedance among programming languages that are object-oriented and relational databases. It also elaborates on many researchers' perspectives on this topic using the ORM tool to generate such an ORM tier. Also, this paper illustrates the different shortcomings of this ORM tier. Pointing out the various approaches to data access layer generation, from databases to programming languages. Pinpointing the pitfalls of the researcher's work and how the researcher has presented their research paper. This paper will also suggest one of the proposed modules to overcome the shortcomings of the ORM tier. The proposed module has two approaches to generating the Data Access tier: reverse engineering, which means mapping from table to code, and Forward engineering, which means generating code first and then creating databases from the code.