alt Hacker News> They make the simple queries slightly simpler, but they do not help you for the harder queries. — me
I dont think it’s possible to say they’re always bad when offering an example of when they make things better. In my eyes, it’s pretty simple: use the ORM for the simple CRUD and simple data querying, because you’ll have to do a lot of it in most codebases.
For everything else, there is in-database processing or dropping down to raw SQL. Even when using an ORM, nobody is preventing you from making an entity mapping against a DB view or calling stored procedures so you can keep the complex querying logic in pure SQL but get an object that’s easy to work with out of it. Plus, you know, any ORM worth their salt will let you point it at a live DB that you’ve run your (hopefully versioned, for example, with dbmate) migrations against and will let you output the backend code for the entity mapping for everything in a single command.
It’s kind of unfortunate that a lot of ORMs do kinda suck and have jagged edges, as well that most attempts at dynamic SQL also remain pretty niche, like: https://mybatis.org/mybatis-3/dynamic-sql.html
> In my eyes, it’s pretty simple: use the ORM for the simple CRUD and simple data querying, because you’ll have to do a lot of it in most codebases.
The "danger" here is the movement towards an object-oriented design instead of a SQL-first approach to querying the database.
In my experience, I have seen ORMs used for these simple CRUD cases and what tends to happen is you have objects with dozens of members when you only need one or two. And then down the line you also start doing JOINs in memory - you just don't recognize it like that.
You see, you get Object X using CRUD and then object Y using CRUD and then you need a way to say which relates to what and... oops now we've done joins in memory. And sometimes, maybe even often times, we're doing all of that for a single field we need in this one place.