I am pleased to announce the initial release of ODB.
ODB is an open-source, compiler-based object-relational mapping (ORM) system for C++. It allows you to persist C++ objects to a relational database without having to deal with tables, columns, or SQL and without manually writing any mapping code. For example:
#pragma db object
friend class odb::access;
#pragma db id auto
unsigned long id_;
unsigned short age_;
ODB is not a framework. It does not dictate how you should write your application. Rather, it is designed to fit into your style and architecture by only handling C++ object persistence and not interfering with any other functionality. As you can see, existing classes can be made persistent with only a few modifications.
Given the above class, we can perform various database operations with its objects:
person john ("John", "Doe", 31);
person jane ("Jane", "Doe", 29);
transaction t (db.begin ());
result r (db.query<person> (query::last == "Doe" && query::age < 30));
copy (r.begin (), r.end (), ostream_iterator<person> (cout, "\n"));
jane.age (jane.age () + 1);
The C++ code that performs the conversion between persistent classes and their database representation is automatically generated by the ODB compiler. The ODB compiler is a real C++ compiler except that it produces C++ instead of assembly or machine code. In particular, it is not an ad-hoc header pre-processor that is only capable of recognizing a subset of C++. ODB is capable of handling any standard C++ code.
The ODB compiler uses the GCC compiler frontend for C++ parsing and is implemented using the new GCC plugin architecture. While ODB uses GCC internally, its output is standard C++ which means that you can use any C++ compiler to build your application.
ODB is written in portable C++ and you should be able to use it with any modern C++ compiler. In particular, we have tested this release on GNU/Linux (x86/x86-64), Windows (x86/x86-64), Mac OS X, and Solaris (x86/x86-64/SPARC) with GNU g++ 4.2.x-4.5.x, MS Visual C++ 2008 and 2010, and Sun Studio 12. The dependency-free ODB compiler binaries are available for all of the above platforms. The initial release supports MySQL as the underlying database. Support for other database systems is in the works.
More information, documentation, source code, and pre-compiled binaries are available from: