Steve Bryant on DataMgr

So, I just got home from the monthly Nashville ColdFusion User Group meeting, and I have to say that I'm looking forward to watching the Breezo (Connecto?) again of Steve Bryant's presentation on DataMgr. This lightweight utility seems like it can actually do some heavy lifting with some of your basic database interaction, handling all of your basic CRUD and a whole lot more. Has some very nice, built-in functionality for handling things like automatic data truncation when inserting to a column of a smaller size (but only if you ask it to), rewriting a batch of records to reflect new sort orders (like when re-ordering display orders), and quite a few other things.

Steve is already using his tool in some fairly well trafficed sites, but he admits that it's primarily for use within administrative backends. He has put together support for several different database platforms, including MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Access (OK, we razzed him a little on this last one.) All in all some very nice functionality, but it's not a replacement for ORM. I personally can't see using DataMgr, myself, for anything more than a small application/site, but I did see some huge benefits within initial development, or within some non-framework Open Source projects (Ray's BlogCFC project kept coming up in conversation around the room.)

Probably one of the coolest things about DataMgr went a little like this: Design your db structure within Access, with the help of the relationships map, verify how data looks using some QuerySim/prototyping like functions, have DataMgr create an xml descriptor of your database tables, then deploy your app to a new server. Change the database type (say, to MySQL) in your DataMgr initialization call and watch your table structure be built or modified in your new datasource. If a table already exists, but you have added new fields, then DataMgr will create the new fields for you without messing with your other data (will not delete existing columns if you forgot to put them in the XML).

OK, so this is a quick-down-and-dirty idea of what DataMgr can do. Steve's presentation is much more digestable, and his examples are very clean and clear cut. We made one or two suggestions to him along the way, to which his response was "That sounds like a great idea, I'll put it in tomorrow." He also has a few other goodies available on his site. Worth at least a once over look.