Alzabo is a tool designed to ease the pains of dealing with a database. It serves several functions. First, it is a data-modeling tool. You describe your schema (tables, columns, indexes, relations, etc.) via a data modeling interface and then Alzabo can generate the SQL necessary to instantiate your schema. It can also reverse engineer an existing schema from a database. Finally, it is capable of generating the SQL necessary to transform an existing schema based on changes made in the data modeler (a SQL diff, if you will).

As an RDBMS-OO mapper, Alzabo is capable of abstracting most types of SQL queries. It has several efficiency features such as lazy column loading, cursors, and row caching. It is also capable of auto-generating various convenience methods to simplify programming.

The presentation will cover:

• Alzabo's web-based schema creation interface.
• How to perform basic data fetching/alteration (insert/select/update/delete). How to construct joins and conditionals.
• The row caching system and how it can be used to keep objects in sync across multiple processes (particularly applicable under mod_perl).
• Lazy column loading.
• Method auto-generation.