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Does OLAP Need an ORM

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Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#31

Post by sgarland »

odie5533 wrote: post #22
wswope wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write INSERT and SELECT statements for the object types you want to persist. What is your concern re: random types popping up? SQLite springs to mind as a prime offender due to not enforcing column types OOTB, but most dialects have rather strong typing. If we’re talking about mapping UUIDs and datetimes from their DB representations to types defined by the language stdlib, that’s usually the responsibility of th…

I'm talking knowing what the shape of the response and shape of the data going in ahead of time and being consistent. SQL is like a black box in and out. I mainly use Python. For that, it's nice to have things like Dataclasses for DTOs or Pydantic models or some sort of DTO class that has known field names and known types. When you use raw SQL, you lose all that or have to roll it yourself. And at that point, you're…

Mapping a DB response to a Pydantic model is hardly an ORM.

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#32

Post by primering »

bakugo wrote: post #29
ram_rar wrote: post #24

Unpopular opinion: in 2025, nobody should be reaching for an ORM first. They’re an anti-pattern at this point. The “abstraction” it promises rarely delivers—what you actually get is leaky, slow, and a nightmare to operate at scale. The sane middle ground is libraries that give you nicer ergonomics around SQL without hiding it (like Golangs sqlx https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx ). Engineers should be writing SQL, perio…

I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the primary purpose of an ORM. It's in the name - Object Relational Mapper. It's meant to ease the mapping from SQL query results into objects in your code, and from objects back to SQL queries. Doing this manually at scale when you have a large number of tables is also a nightmare. There's no rule saying you can't integrate your own manually written SQL with an ORM, and…

Well said. Please never be silent over this fact. It's important to educate people on what an ORM is, what it means and especially what it doesn't mean. Especially in times where VC-baked companies misinform and manipulate people about that, like Prisma is doing

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#33

Post by primering »

sdairs wrote: post #14
cies wrote: post #6

My take is... No one needs an ORM: https://dev.to/cies/the-case-against-orms-5bh4 The article opens with "ORMs have proven to be useful for many developers" -- I believe the opposite is true.

Is the proposition in the OP not pretty much what you're suggesting in your blog? They're currently not using the query builder syntax, instead its pretty much "improving on SQL as strings" with a bunch of the other ORM-like benefits (type safety, autocomplete, etc.) Perhaps saying "ORM" is a bit of a misnomer, but they're discussing the DX ergonomics of an ORM and acknowledging the exact challenges you describe

Yeah it's funny they even mention ORM while at the same offering something that has nothing to do with ORMs at all. Yes, many ORM libraries offer additional tools like migration and querybuiler, but that's not the point of an ORM. ORM maps relation data to your OOP data structures. They completely misused the term entirely, which is kinda surprising.

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#34

Post by primering »

sgarland wrote: post #31
odie5533 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking knowing what the shape of the response and shape of the data going in ahead of time and being consistent. SQL is like a black box in and out. I mainly use Python. For that, it's nice to have things like Dataclasses for DTOs or Pydantic models or some sort of DTO class that has known field names and known types. When you use raw SQL, you lose all that or have to roll it yourself. And at that point, you're…

Mapping a DB response to a Pydantic model is hardly an ORM.

No, that is exactly what an ORM is, plus mapping it back. Anything around that is additional toolings that no ORM needs to be ORM, but is nonetheless usefull.

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#35

Post by timgdelisle »

barrkel wrote: post #30

If you're doing OLAP, you probably want dimensions, measures and operators that operate on time aggregations and shifts. You want rollups and drill downs along multiple axes, with subtotals and probably pivots. SQL isn't wholly adequate for this, it's hard work to get the SQL right and if there's joins involved it's not hard to accidentally fan out and start double counting. If you ask me, you want an analytic model…

Very much agree with you, at this point the abstraction is too low-level to be considered a proper ORM (or whatever the acronym should be for OLAP) and we're progressively working our way up to the right level. I love the idea of operating at the dimensions/measures level. Hoping we address this concern in the next couple of releases! Really appreciate the feedback

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#36

Post by cyberax »

ram_rar wrote: post #24

Unpopular opinion: in 2025, nobody should be reaching for an ORM first. They’re an anti-pattern at this point. The “abstraction” it promises rarely delivers—what you actually get is leaky, slow, and a nightmare to operate at scale. The sane middle ground is libraries that give you nicer ergonomics around SQL without hiding it (like Golangs sqlx https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx ). Engineers should be writing SQL, perio…

> Engineers should be writing SQL, period.

Is it a variation of: "I suffered when I was young, so everyone must suffer as I did?"

SQL is terrible, however you slice it. It's a verbose bass-ackwards language. ORMs that remove the need to deal with SQL for 99% of trivial cases are great.

The rest 1% can remain painful.

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#37

Post by parpfish »

bakugo wrote: post #29
ram_rar wrote: post #24

Unpopular opinion: in 2025, nobody should be reaching for an ORM first. They’re an anti-pattern at this point. The “abstraction” it promises rarely delivers—what you actually get is leaky, slow, and a nightmare to operate at scale. The sane middle ground is libraries that give you nicer ergonomics around SQL without hiding it (like Golangs sqlx https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx ). Engineers should be writing SQL, perio…

I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the primary purpose of an ORM. It's in the name - Object Relational Mapper. It's meant to ease the mapping from SQL query results into objects in your code, and from objects back to SQL queries. Doing this manually at scale when you have a large number of tables is also a nightmare. There's no rule saying you can't integrate your own manually written SQL with an ORM, and…

the trouble is that even if people embrace that thinking, the ORM encourages them to pull entities out of the db and do a bunch of computation in the server that would be much faster to do in the db.

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#38

Post by dijksterhuis »

sgarland wrote: post #31
odie5533 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking knowing what the shape of the response and shape of the data going in ahead of time and being consistent. SQL is like a black box in and out. I mainly use Python. For that, it's nice to have things like Dataclasses for DTOs or Pydantic models or some sort of DTO class that has known field names and known types. When you use raw SQL, you lose all that or have to roll it yourself. And at that point, you're…

Mapping a DB response to a Pydantic model is hardly an ORM.

> Pydantic serves as a great tool for defining models for ORM (object relational mapping) libraries. ORMs are used to map objects to database tables, and vice versa.

https://docs.pydantic.dev/latest/examples/orms/

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#39

Post by datadrivenangel »

lpapez wrote: post #9
ElatedOwl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that being fastest, but not cheapest. In my experience these one off reports are very brittle. The app ends up making schema changes that are breaking to these one off reports, and you usually don’t find out until it goes to production. I’ve dealt with the maintenance nightmare before. At current gig we’re exploring solutions, curious what a robust pipeline looks like in 2025. The ORM piece is interestin…

Why not test the OLAP reports? Surely there is a way to run a raw query in Rails/ActiveRecord and use it in a smoke test?

They call this Data Contracts.

Re: Does OLAP Need an ORM

#40

Post by dcmatt »

Just expose a way to explore hierarchies and measures, give me an ability to generate "alternate hierarchies" then let me run MDX and leave me alone! ORM and OLAP don't belong in the same sentence together.
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