Russell Walker has a new post today comparing two popular methods for abstracting out database access and working with your data - the Active Record and Data Mapper patterns for data persistence.

These two design patterns are explained in Martin Fowler's book 'Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture', and represent ways of handling data persistence in object oriented programming.

He gives simple code examples of both - one showing a basic "save" call with Active Record and the other showing the saving of a "Foo" entity using similar logic. Along with these examples, he also includes a few points about the major advantages and disadvantages related to the pattern. He also talks some about "service objects", the go-between that the data mapper pattern uses to combine business logic and the mapper object. He ends the post by making some suggestions about which to use, depending on the need of course.