"Impedance Mismatch" Everyone who talks about ADO.NET Orcas now uses this term which was already a biggie in the ORM world. It sounds really good. Very academic.But I'm starting to get annoyed with the fact that it seems to have unintentionally become the sub-title for ADO.NET Orcas.
The first time I ever heard the phrase was out of Pablo Castro's mouth when he was talking about "ADO.NET 3.0" (the original nickname of ADO.NET Orcas). I can only guess that anyone who doesn't have a comp sci degree or hasn't been using ORM tools (I fall into both categories), has no clue what it really means. However, it has been the key buzz word for ADO.NET Orcas. "It solves the Impedance Mismatch problem" is THE quote about the Entity Framework.
The word Impedance comes from the electricity world - where something is preventing electricity to flow from one place to another.
With data, there is a mismatch between relational data and objects. There is no direct relationship between them. A translator needs to exist between them. , Object Relational Mapping, and in the case of ADO.NET Orcas, the Entity Framework, are the bridges. Or, without them, just a whole lotta code! Impedence Mismatch was adopted to describe this problem.
But "Impedance Mismatch" confused me as I tried to force the words to describe the problem as a mismatch with impedance being used as an adjective. An impedance-creating mismatch. Mismatch seems to be the noun and impedance tries to describe it. But they appear (in my mind) to be placed in the wrong order!
I think Mismatch Impedance is a little better. In this case impedance is the noun with mismatch as an adjective. It's an impedance, right? What kind of an impedance is it? It's one that is created by a mismatch. Mismatch Impedance, with mismatch describing impedance, works for me.
The other solution seems to be Impeding Mismatch, but that sounds too much like stampeding which, depending on how serious you think this mismatch problem is (and yes it is a big problem) may actually not be a bad choice either.
Either way, I think I'll just try to avoid the phrase, as it is clearly not part of my natural vocabulary.