Last night Steve Bryant offered the DFW CFUG a great presentation live from Tulsa, OK via Acrobat Connect covering his free and open source DataMgr project. Rather than some abstraction tools that are intended to basically be your data model, DataMgr seems to take more of the roll of the interaction with the database itself, whether you want to use it within the DAO/Gateway of an OO system or whether you just use it as your database layer on action pages of procedural code.

Some of the features that Steve presented include:

• Full dynamic querying capability, including the ability to call a "save" method and let DataMgr determine whether a row should be created or updated.
• It can perform "Active Schema" work - the ability to generate tables that don't yet exists on a system, including the ability to have "seed" data that will be inserted into a table as it is created. This would be a very cool feature when it comes to either deploying an application or moving an application from development to production.
• DataMgr has many cool features such as "Special" functionality on existing columns and "Relation Fields" which make fake columns with aggregate data and such.
• You can flip DataMgr into "sim" mode which basically creates fake databases including generated data that makes prototyping a breeze without the need for a database to actually exists.
  
• Very cool feature that actually scrubs for special characters such as MS Word's "smart quotes" an turns them into their standard equivalents.
• Other notable features include the ability to throw special error messages for data that is too long for columns.  It also has a setting that allows you DataMgr to truncate strings to make them fit.
• The ability to add and maintain "sort" columns in tables.
  
• The ability to turn on verbose logging of each data transaction, returning not only the exact SQL that was run, but a dump of the structure of data that was passed to DataMgr.
• much more...

I strongly urge you to go check out Steve's product. Here are several urls to get you going:

• Main Project Page on RIAForge
• DataMgr demo - NOTE: at the bottom of every page, you will see the actual CFML that was used to generate the page
  
• Additional project information