This example shows how to persist objects that use Boost smart pointers, containers, and value types with the help of the Boost profile library (libodb-boost). The example consists of the following files: employee.hxx Header file defining the 'employee' and 'employer' persistent classes. We use shared_ptr/weak_ptr smart pointers provided by Boost (as well as their lazy versions provided by the Boost profile library) to establish a bidirectional employee-employer relationship. We also use the boost::gregorian::date type to store the employee's date of birth and the boost::unordered_set container to keep track of the employee's email addresses. The employee's object id is boost::uuids::uuid. Finally, we use boost::optional for the optional middle name. If the middle name is not present, it will be represented in the database as a NULL value. employee-odb.hxx employee-odb.ixx employee-odb.cxx employee.sql The first three files contain the database support code and the last file contains the database schema for the employee.hxx header. These files are generated by the ODB compiler from employee.hxx using the following command line: odb -d <database> --profile boost --generate-schema --generate-query \ --generate-session employee.hxx Where <database> stands for the database system we are using, for example, 'mysql'. The -p option is used to instruct the ODB compiler to load the Boost profile. The --generate-session option is used to enable session support for all the persistent classes in employee.hxx. database.hxx Contains the create_database() function which instantiates the concrete database class corresponding to the database system we are using. driver.cxx Driver for the example. It includes the employee.hxx and employee-odb.hxx headers to gain access to the persistent classes and their database support code. It also includes database.hxx for the create_database() function declaration. In main() the driver first calls create_database() to obtain the database instance. It then creates a number of 'employee' and 'employer' objects and persists them in the database. The next transaction loads all the employees of a particular employer using the employee-employer relationship. Finally, the driver performs a few database queries which use data members of the various Boost value types in their criterion. To compile and link the example manually from the command line we can use the following commands (using MySQL as an example; replace 'c++' with your C++ compiler name): c++ -c employee-odb.cxx c++ -DDATABASE_MYSQL -c driver.cxx c++ -o driver driver.o employee-odb.o -lodb-boost -lodb-mysql -lodb \ -lboost_date_time To run the example we may first need to create the database schema (for some database systems, such as SQLite, the schema is embedded into the generated code which makes this step unnecessary). Using MySQL as an example, this can be achieved with the following command: mysql --user=odb_test --database=odb_test < employee.sql Here we use 'odb_test' as the database login and also 'odb_test' as the database name. Once the database schema is ready, we can run the example (using MySQL as the database): ./driver --user odb_test --database odb_test