What is “Impedance Mismatch” and how does it relate to databases?
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Answer
Quoted from hacked.com
Imagine you have a low current flashlight that normally uses AAA
batteries. Don’t try this at home, but suppose you could attach your
car battery to the flashlight. The low current flashlight will
pitifully output a fraction of the light energy that the high current
battery is capable of producing. Likewise, if you attached the AAA
batteries to Batman’s spotlight, you’ll also get low output. However,
match the AAA batteries to the flashlight and they will run with
maximum efficiency.So taking this discussion back to software engineering, if you
imagine the flow of data to be analogous to a current, then the
impedance of a relational data model is not matched with the impedance
of an object hierarchy. Therefore, the data will not flow with maximum
efficiency, a result of the impedance mismatch.