What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#21

Post by gedy » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

One nice thing about the rise of ORMs back in the day was it broke the stranglehold our traditional DBAs had on the data tier. I respected them and their skills, but in a product org it was really difficult to have a separate group that refused to participate in planning and wanted to design everything up front, optimize based on their performance assumptions, and then who would argue with devs when we'd need to do pretty normal things like, say, list users in a webapp.

I'm talking about my experience, not generalizing to all DBAs of course. And of course ORMs introduced performance issues, etc.

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#22

Post by bluefirebrand » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

stephen wrote: post #15

I'm admittedly an ORM apologist [1], but a few of his points articulated as "deal breakers" aren't that bad imo: - "the pernicious use of foreign keys [...] links between classes are [...] foreign keys" ==> that just sounds like schema normalization, which is usually a good thing? - "bending over backwards [...] to generate SQL that runs efficiently" ==> the huge majority of ORM-driven queries are "select * from tabl…

> Folks who dislike ORMs seem to have this false dichotomy that "the ORM _must_ be used for all queries", which is a self-imposed/unpractical restriction.

I've always heard a major selling point of ORMs is "You don't have to write the actual SQL anymore"

Because of that, I tend to not trust people who use ORMs to even know how to write queries by hand in the first place

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#23

Post by stephen » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

swasheck wrote: post #17

stephen wrote: post #15

I'm admittedly an ORM apologist [1], but a few of his points articulated as "deal breakers" aren't that bad imo: - "the pernicious use of foreign keys [...] links between classes are [...] foreign keys" ==> that just sounds like schema normalization, which is usually a good thing? - "bending over backwards [...] to generate SQL that runs efficiently" ==> the huge majority of ORM-driven queries are "select * from tabl…

> Folks who dislike ORMs seem to have this false dichotomy that "the ORM _must_ be used for all queries", which is a self-imposed/unpractical restriction my experience is the exact opposite. People who love and advocate the merits of ORM insist that everything be executed through ORM because it introduces too much complexity for them to blend handwritten SQL with the ORM generated queries

Fair point, both "pro ORM" and "anti ORM" camps are prone to extreme stances.

I definitely don't agree with the "all queries must be executed through the ORM", and think that dogmatic stance has done a lot of damage to the ORM brand. :-/

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#24

Post by Waterluvian » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

What Python taught me: just use C.

These are simply tools. The only wrong opinion is to believe that there’s a strict superiority of one over another. However, the content of this and other blogs can help people make informed decisions on when to reach for each tool.

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#25

Post by HelloNurse » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

swasheck wrote: post #17

stephen wrote: post #15

I'm admittedly an ORM apologist [1], but a few of his points articulated as "deal breakers" aren't that bad imo: - "the pernicious use of foreign keys [...] links between classes are [...] foreign keys" ==> that just sounds like schema normalization, which is usually a good thing? - "bending over backwards [...] to generate SQL that runs efficiently" ==> the huge majority of ORM-driven queries are "select * from tabl…

> Folks who dislike ORMs seem to have this false dichotomy that "the ORM _must_ be used for all queries", which is a self-imposed/unpractical restriction my experience is the exact opposite. People who love and advocate the merits of ORM insist that everything be executed through ORM because it introduces too much complexity for them to blend handwritten SQL with the ORM generated queries

They don't consider the ORM the second class citizen it actually is: an optional simplified alternative to normal queries, that can be used for the easy cases.

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#26

Post by hatefulheart » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

stephen wrote: post #15

I'm admittedly an ORM apologist [1], but a few of his points articulated as "deal breakers" aren't that bad imo: - "the pernicious use of foreign keys [...] links between classes are [...] foreign keys" ==> that just sounds like schema normalization, which is usually a good thing? - "bending over backwards [...] to generate SQL that runs efficiently" ==> the huge majority of ORM-driven queries are "select * from tabl…

I have seen many ORM enjoyers argue the point about “you can just use SQL!” but I have never once seen an ORM enjoyer allow it, much less do it themselves in an actual codebase. They will time and time again prefer you write 100 lines of Typescript/Python for what could be achieved with 15 lines of SQL.

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#27

Post by hparadiz » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

swasheck wrote: post #17

stephen wrote: post #15

I'm admittedly an ORM apologist [1], but a few of his points articulated as "deal breakers" aren't that bad imo: - "the pernicious use of foreign keys [...] links between classes are [...] foreign keys" ==> that just sounds like schema normalization, which is usually a good thing? - "bending over backwards [...] to generate SQL that runs efficiently" ==> the huge majority of ORM-driven queries are "select * from tabl…

> Folks who dislike ORMs seem to have this false dichotomy that "the ORM _must_ be used for all queries", which is a self-imposed/unpractical restriction my experience is the exact opposite. People who love and advocate the merits of ORM insist that everything be executed through ORM because it introduces too much complexity for them to blend handwritten SQL with the ORM generated queries

I've written/worked on several ORMs from scratch. ORMs are the industry standard. When I see posts like this I simply can't take them seriously. All they are saying is "I won't be a team player" and "I don't actually understand the subject matter". The reality is at a certain scale there's an entire orm team that optimizes everything. But even when there's no team involved there's no way you can write anything more optimized because I'm already at the computational limit of how far something can be optimized.

There's no (good) ORM that doesn't let you simply put your own query in.

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#28

Post by stephen » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #22

stephen wrote: post #15

I'm admittedly an ORM apologist [1], but a few of his points articulated as "deal breakers" aren't that bad imo: - "the pernicious use of foreign keys [...] links between classes are [...] foreign keys" ==> that just sounds like schema normalization, which is usually a good thing? - "bending over backwards [...] to generate SQL that runs efficiently" ==> the huge majority of ORM-driven queries are "select * from tabl…

> Folks who dislike ORMs seem to have this false dichotomy that "the ORM _must_ be used for all queries", which is a self-imposed/unpractical restriction. I've always heard a major selling point of ORMs is "You don't have to write the actual SQL anymore" Because of that, I tend to not trust people who use ORMs to even know how to write queries by hand in the first place

You're right, that has been another "pro ORM" pitch that has gone awry and, taken to the extreme, is wrong imo.

My nuanced articulation is "you don't have to write the _boilerplate_ SQL for the 90% of just-do-some-CRUD endpoints in your enterprise SaaS application, but you 100% need to 'know SQL' for the last 5-10% of ~reporting/analytics queries that the ORM is going to mess up".

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#29

Post by bluefirebrand » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

noisy_boy wrote: post #8

As someone who started their programming journey with SQL, it just feels so odd hearing about learning SQL being presented as an useful option. I get it, it just feels odd. SQL was considered table stakes in the financial IT world - if you said you didn't know SQL, people would look at you funny.

It's very strange too. You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon. The remainder is stuff that you only really need for extremely performance sensitive operations

Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

#30

Post by bluefirebrand » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

stephen wrote: post #28

bluefirebrand wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Folks who dislike ORMs seem to have this false dichotomy that "the ORM _must_ be used for all queries", which is a self-imposed/unpractical restriction. I've always heard a major selling point of ORMs is "You don't have to write the actual SQL anymore" Because of that, I tend to not trust people who use ORMs to even know how to write queries by hand in the first place

You're right, that has been another "pro ORM" pitch that has gone awry and, taken to the extreme, is wrong imo. My nuanced articulation is "you don't have to write the _boilerplate_ SQL for the 90% of just-do-some-CRUD endpoints in your enterprise SaaS application, but you 100% need to 'know SQL' for the last 5-10% of ~reporting/analytics queries that the ORM is going to mess up".

Personally I find the 90% boilerplate SQL is easy enough to write that injecting an ORM into the process doesn't make much sense

But that's just me