131–140 of 354 posts
LLMs are better at writing raw queries now and knowing the consequences of how it fits in your architecture (if you ask) So I think the ORM debate could be over postgresql is a beast
ORMs are just a layer of abstraction. Like any abstraction, they make some tradeoffs that can get you into some sticky situations like inefficient queries mentioned in the article.
But, if you understand the tradeoffs, you can use them for what they're good for (standardization & simplification & in-codebase schema definitions & so on) and usually drop down to SQL whenever there's a particularly necessary case.
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
> You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon.
It's an ugly little language that one has to come back to and re-learn over and over at different levels of sophistication. Nothing wrong with that, but to suggest it's trivial is a gross mischaracterization.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I don’t understand this comment because in no way did I express that I’m not the team player. Seems like this is something of a sacred cow for you. Or maybe it’s a language barrier thing, but all I was trying to do was say that as a member of the data platform team, when I recommend handwritten SQL to address specific limitations of an orm, that is the response that I got. Hope this helps.
You wrote the exact opposite of my opinion here which is why I replied to your specifically:
> 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 believe strongly that good ORMs expose the ability to put your own queries in. But I can't possibly boil down all the reasons for this in one HN comment.
An ORM is not a query writer. It's a way to map SQL primitives to run time primitives in a static deterministic way backed by a suite of unit tests.
If you have a special query you wanna run that has 10 joins, 2 sub queries, and a derived view that's totally fine. No one says you can't. However remember that statistically 99.9% of all queries are not that.
The argument that really hits home for me, after 30+ years in this industry, is stored procedures. The “Stored Procedures are Evil” argument to me is an artifact of an industry that promotes treating engineers and infrastructure as entirely interchangeable and anything that gets in the way of that is Evil(tm). But what working at Salesforce in the 2000’s taught me is that you can do really amazing things if you’re wi…
Even when using other languages, I just pine for LINQ/EF Core. It's truly the best ORM in my opinion. Also, even if one does not want to use the LINQ or the Query syntax (I forgot what it was called), the ability to execute SQL is also still a game changer.
There's immense value in everything being typed from the API down to the DB queries.
// EF-inspired type-safe API in TypeScript
const query = (q) =>
q
.from("users")
.where((u) => u.age >= 18 && u.email.includes("@company.com"))
.orderBy((u) => u.name)
.select((u) => ({ id: u.id, name: u.name, email: u.email }));
I was against ORMs until I used EF Core in .NET which I really loved. A good ORM is amazing for productivity and when needed you can always write raw SQL. I don't use .NET anymore but lately I've been happy with Drizzle for TS. It's very performant and expressive. After years it seems that they're finally going to release v1.0 soon. Personally I would never go back to writing all my queries with SQL, manually mapping…