What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
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What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
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Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#2I've caught a lot of flak for saying this, but I'm convinced that all ORMs are ultimately tech debt. Sure, they get you up and running quickly, but once you're there, you'll invariably find yourself wanting to do things that require you to work against and around your ORM to accomplish. By pretty much any definition I've ever encountered, that's "tech debt"
Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#3I've caught a lot of flak for saying this, but I'm convinced that all ORMs are ultimately tech debt. Sure, they get you up and running quickly, but once you're there, you'll invariably find yourself wanting to do things that require you to work against and around your ORM to accomplish. By pretty much any definition I've ever encountered, that's "tech debt"
(caveat: I'm a developer but I haven't used ORMs very much.)
Don't most ORMs let you write raw SQL when you really want to? In that case, you could use the ORM for simple things, but revert to raw SQL when you need more power. Or is that not the case?
Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#4I have a laravel project for which all of my models are raw SQL statements for this reason. At the very least, it makes the code more portable, and it makes it easier to reason about the statements when you can actually see them.
Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#5ORM like anything aren't all in the same league. I didn't like them blindly, but SQLAlchemy works very well (because its layered architecture).
Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#6I've caught a lot of flak for saying this, but I'm convinced that all ORMs are ultimately tech debt. Sure, they get you up and running quickly, but once you're there, you'll invariably find yourself wanting to do things that require you to work against and around your ORM to accomplish. By pretty much any definition I've ever encountered, that's "tech debt"
(caveat: I'm a developer but I haven't used ORMs very much.) Don't most ORMs let you write raw SQL when you really want to? In that case, you could use the ORM for simple things, but revert to raw SQL when you need more power. Or is that not the case?
Often that is not the case as ORMs keep a lot of internal state, so if you go bypassing them you no longer get any benefit from the ORM at all.
Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#7Here's a thought experiment. Lets say we lived in a world without SQL and the default way to talk to DB's was through an ORM....
And then someone came and said: "I created this concise and super flexible language for querying data." Would people want it? I think they would, and we'd see tons of articles about vast forests of objects being replaced by small snippets of SQL.
Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#8In Django, for me the killer feature of the ORM is that it's (mostly) database agnostic, which means that you can use Postgres in production and in-memory sqlite when testing, which makes testing a gajillion times faster.
If you start writing custom SQL you have to introduce horrible bodges to work with whatever database is in use.
Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#9See also from a few years ago: http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern
I agree with basically everything in this post, obviously :-)
Re: What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL
#10Here's a thought experiment. Lets say we lived in a world without SQL and the default way to talk to DB's was through an ORM.... And then someone came and said: "I created this concise and super flexible language for querying data." Would people want it? I think they would, and we'd see tons of articles about vast forests of objects being replaced by small snippets of SQL.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened. See: ISAM databases as found in COBOL programs.