Implementing object-relational mapping
There are two primary techniques to achieve a relational mapping between objects. The first technique involves pre-loading the related child objects into the parent object. The advantage to this approach is that it is easy to implement, and all parent-child information is immediately available. The disadvantage is that large amounts of memory are potentially consumed, and the performance curve is skewed.
The second technique is to embed a secondary lookup into the parent object. In this latter approach, when you need to access the child objects, you would run a getter that would perform the secondary lookup. The advantage of this approach is that performance demands are spread out throughout the request cycle, and memory usage is (or can be) more easily managed. The disadvantage of this approach is that there are more queries generated, which means more work for the database server.
Note
Please note, however, that we will show how the use of prepared statements...
