Object Relational Mappers occupy an important role in today's database programming landscape. Most of them, sensibly, focus on generating SQL statements from various object activities and sending those statements to the database. There is nothing wrong with this approach, except that when you have a direct API to your Cluster Storage Engine like the NDBAPI, there is no point in doing all that work to generate SQL that MySQL is just going to turn right around and translate into calls to the NDBAPI.

We'll look at a Proof of Concept ORM system designed to talk directly to MySQL Cluster over the NDBAPI using Python/NDB bindings. Basic object creation and usage will be covered as well as internals of the ORM and possible strategies for moving forward. Hopefully, interest will be kindled in engineering some of the popular existing ORM Frameworks to allow for a direct NDBAPI layer.

The target audience includes anyone interested in the guts of an ORM, or people interested in seeing a functional example of NDBAPI programming that does more than just fetch a list of integers from a two-column table.