My experience with AR so far is that it’s great for simple one-table problem, fine for simple multi-table work but gets difficult to use in some multi-table scenarios, possibly not the most common ones, but one’s I’ve had to deal with.
Discussing it with other, more experienced Yii users I found several who concede there is a degree of impedance mismatch between SQL and PHP’s notion of objects.
It struck me that key concepts of AR and maybe much of its API might be applicable to a NoSQL data store such as Couch, for example. Who knows, AR’s object modeling approach might work even better that with SQL.
Have any attempts been made in this direction? Or is the idea just daft?