POCO Entities in ADO.NET 4.0 - One of the most anticipated features of the Entity Framework 4.0 is the ability to have POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) entities. This allows developers to produce domain objects free of any persistence baggage, with no requirements imposed inheritance-wise. Up till now entity objects were required to either inherit EntityObject or had to implement IEntityWithKey, IEntityWithChangeTracker and IEntityWithRelationships. This makes it far easier to use EF with legacy domain classes and keeps data models clean and unconcerned with their own persistence. To demonstrate this feature I'll start out with a basic SQL Server table structure and test data that maps employees to departments. Database create table Departments ( Department_ID int identity primary key clustered, Name varchar(255) not null ) create table Employees ( Employee_ID int identity primary key clustered, FirstName varchar(255)...
Using Entity Framework with Oracle - I've long thought that the Entity Framework hasn't gotten a fair shake. Sure, there's some room for improvement but for an out-of-the-box ORM that ships with the framework it's not too bad. One thing has always troubled me, though. I was never sure what kind of traction it had with data sources other than SQL Server. Recently in a project circumstances conspired in such a fashion that it would be pretty darn handy to use EF to access data in Oracle. Turns out it that despite being a little rough around the edges it's very feasible. The Provider The first step is to download and install an Entity Framework provider for Oracle. There are several options out there but the Oracle Data Provider for Entity Framework on CodePlex seems to be...
Stored Procedures in Django - Web development platforms like Django go a long way to removing the need for writing hand-crafted SQL with all of their ORM goodness. Sometimes, for some reason or another, it's handy to execute hand-crafted SQL code or even a stored procedure. Naturally that should be a last resort and I don't intend on starting a discussion about when it is and when is not appropriate, but for those situations where it is this article applies. Database To illustrate how to do this I'll start out with the following MySQL table (the remainder of the post assumes it's filled with sample data). It'll sit underneath the the Document class in an application named "searcher". I'm sort of working backwards here as I've actually generated this table from a model I've included later...
Using Solr in Django for Full-Text Searching via Solango - I've been doing quite a bit of work with Solr lately, both at the office and at home and, by golly, I love it! It's very powerful and simple to integrate with regardless of your platform. In this post I'll explain how to use Solr as a data-store independent search provider for Django projects. I'll assume that you have a functional Solr install and generally understand how to use it. If that's not the case Apache's Solr documentation can help. Get Solango The easiest way to get your project talking to Solr is via the Solango Django application. Grab the source from here and copy the solango sub-directory into your PYTHON_PATH. Configure Solango Solango must now be configured. Jump into the solango directory that you copied above and edit the settings.py...
