(Some) ORM haters do get it

Post by jshen » Mon, May 14, 2012, 4:56 PM UTC

fusiongyro wrote: post #40

debacle wrote: post #12

I don't understand where this ORM 'divide' is coming from. ORMs are powerful, because they let you say less and do more. For 90% of the queries out there, an ORM is fine. SQL is powerful, because you can control and fine-tune your statements. For the remaining 10%, use SQL. Are ORMs bad? No. Can you them for everything? No. The same thing can be said for almost every technology in existence.

The divide is fundamentally about choosing what's in charge of your system, the system being composed of your databases, your applications, and your supporting infrastructure (your scripts, your migrations, etc.) To relational database folk such as myself, the central authority is the database, and our principal interests are what ACID exists to provide: concurrent, isolated, atomic transactions that cannot be lost,…

Post by wvenable » Mon, May 14, 2012, 4:59 PM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #49

parfe wrote: post #44

Any system I've worked in that didn't use an ORM still implements an ORM. Save methods which runs insert or updates. GetAll methods get_by_username, get_by_id, get_by_email, get_recent, get_by_foreign_keyed_object, get_by_other_foreign_keyed_object. And all those hand coded methods directly tied to the dialect of the db the original developer used. Using Hibernate I had to write raw SQL for some reporting. I've never…

Exactly. Or more explicitly, the anti-ORM argument, to me, consists of: ORM works fine for A through W, but SQL is better for X, Y, Z. So rather than just the common sense solution of writing just X,Y,Z in raw SQL, everything has to be written in raw SQL.

Post by DenisM » Mon, May 14, 2012, 5:18 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #46

fusiongyro wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The divide is fundamentally about choosing what's in charge of your system, the system being composed of your databases, your applications, and your supporting infrastructure (your scripts, your migrations, etc.) To relational database folk such as myself, the central authority is the database, and our principal interests are what ACID exists to provide: concurrent, isolated, atomic transactions that cannot be lost,…

Your response is long, but altogether too subjective, philosophical, and tautological. What matters is consistency, usability, and agility. Throwing ORMs out the window will give you as much consistency as you can squeeze out of an SQL server, but will greatly reduce your agility. Using an ORM for everything will greatly increase your agility but will reduce your usability. As in everything, there is a balance. Peopl…

Post by skybrian » Mon, May 14, 2012, 5:28 PM UTC

Post by nbm » Mon, May 14, 2012, 5:40 PM UTC

silverbax88 wrote: post #53

mattmanser wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the truth is the days of DB being king are almost gone. These days you just don't hear about DBAs at all any more. You used to see constant jokes about DBAs being a pain in the ass and stopping programmers doing X or Y. ORMs going to win because there aren't enough of you left. Stored procedures, triggers, etc. are going to be viewed as ancient technology back from the days of yore when people didn't understand h…

I'm not sure where you're working that there are no DBAs..not an enterprise shop. Honestly, every time I see how badly Facebook handles data and caching, I can't help but wonder why they don't use a real data store and DBAs.