Awesome SQL blog • Hacker News Board

Re: Awesome SQL blog

#21

Post by artsrc » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 11:39 PM UTC

notauser wrote: post #5

sivers wrote: post #3

Fans of this will probably also like Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties. ISBN: 0123693799 It's unfortunate that a lot of new programmers are relying on their framework's ORM to abstract the SQL away from them, weakening their understanding of it.

I'm good enough at SQL to know about normal forms and how to write recursive queries. I also know that there is very little value in me writing a new set of CRUD queries for a low-load site when someone else has written a well-debugged interface for me.

Are both a full featured object model, and an SQL database really essential for that kind of site?

I essentially share the same SQL, OO, ORM hammer, as you, so I would likely use the same solution.

It may be that all 3 complex technologies, the database, the object model, and the ORM are unwarranted by the low load/crud problem.

Re: Awesome SQL blog

#22

Post by artsrc » Mon, Nov 23, 2009, 12:02 AM UTC

sivers wrote: post #3

Fans of this will probably also like Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties. ISBN: 0123693799 It's unfortunate that a lot of new programmers are relying on their framework's ORM to abstract the SQL away from them, weakening their understanding of it.

Maintaining a model feature in three places, the SQL, the class and a manual mapping, violates the basic principles of database modelling (store facts once), at the meta level (rather than the data level).

ORM is a flawed attempt to remedy this. It is flawed because client/server sql databases create a distributed system, and distribution is hard to abstract away.

Other solutions solution are to ditch the SQL model (something like bigtable, db4o or Gemstone?), or to ditch the object model (something like PHP or Access?).

Re: Awesome SQL blog

#23

Post by gaius » Mon, Nov 23, 2009, 7:38 AM UTC

samuel wrote: post #16

kingkilr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a little unfair to people using ORMs. Obviously I'd hope people don't want to avoid knowledge, but I'll be damned if I want to write SQL, it's not fun for me. That being said I contribute to the ORM of my framework of choice, if I write the solution to my problem once I'll never have to do it again. I think it's a bit like complaining that C programs are trying to abstract away assembly. Yes they are,…

Personally I don't get ORM's. May be it's because the only I have had to deal with was Hibernate, and seemed to me as an innecesary layer of complexity and bloat, and objects and relations sometimes doesn't map nicely. If you want to persist objects, use an object datastore in the first place, not a relational one. And, what's wrong with SQL? It's simple, powerful, widely known and deployed, and cool(declarative prog…

The people who hate SQL don't know about any of the cool stuff it can do as they've only ever used MySQL's very basic implementation.