The red orbs of the alzabo were something more, neither the intelligence of humankind nor the the innocence of the brutes. So a fiend might look, I thought, when it had at last struggled up from the pit of some dark star.
Gene Wolfe --
The Sword of the Lictor
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About Alzabo
Alzabo is Perl-based project with two major aspects.
Alzabo is a data modelling tool. It allows you to define a schema by creating tables, columns, indexes, foreign keys, etc. There is a Mason-based schema creation tool, which can be used with any web browser. This tool allows you to create and edit any number of schemas.
This tool is capable of generating the SQL statements necessary to create a new schema or it can reverse engineer an already existing schema. Once you have created a schema once, Alzabo is smart enough to generate "differential SQL" in order to apply future changes.
Alzabo also functions as an RDBMS-OO mapping tool. What this means is that instead of using SQL to access your database, you are given an object-oriented wrapper with which to access your data. It is quite likely that if you worked on a large database-backed project, you may used or written a customized wrapper of a similar nature. Alzabo provides the same thing, but in a generic manner, meaning you don't have to rewrite the same things over and over again.
Alzabo has been in development since December of 1999, though it did not see its first release until July of 2000. Alzabo is primarily the work of one developer, Dave Rolsky, though I have had help from a number of people, in the form of suggestions, bug reports, and patches.