alt Hacker NewsI've loved and used Django ORM and SQLAlchemy for many years. It got me a long way in my career. But at this point I've sworn-off using query-builders and ORMs. I just write real, hand-crafted SQL now. These "any db" abstractions just make for the worst query patterns. They're easy and map nicely to your application language, but they're really terrible unless you want to put in the effort to meta-program SQL using whatever constructs the builder library offers you. CTEs? Windows? Correlated subqueries? It's a lot. And they're always lazy, so you never really know when the N+1s are going to happen.
Just write SQL. I figured this out when I realized that my application was written in Rust, but really it was a Postgres application. I use PG-specific features extensively. My data, and database, are the core of everything that my application does, or will ever do. Why am I caring about some convenient abstractions to make it easier to work with in Rust, or Python, or whatever?
Nah. Just write the good SQL for your database.
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SQL is such a joy to work with compared to all the baggage ORMs bring. I’m not against ORMs but I like to keep them as thin as possible (mostly to map columns to data objects). I’ve been happily using JDBC and Spring Data JDBC (when I needed to use Repository pattern) for a long time in Java.
I love SQL and use it all day long to answer various business questions, but I would never use raw SQL in my code unless there is a good reason for it (sometimes there is). ORMs are there for maintainability, composability, type safety, migrations, etc.. trying to do all that with raw SQL strings doesn't scale in a large code base. You need something that IDE tools can understand and allow things like 'find all references', 'rename instances', compile time type checks, etc.. Raw SQL strings can't get you that. And managing thousands of raw SQL strings in a code base is not sustainable.
ORMs are one of those things that a lot of people think is a replacement for knowing SQL. Or that ORMs are used as a crutch. That has nothing to do with it. Very similar to how people here talked about TypeScript 10 years ago in a very dismissive way. Not really understanding its purpose. Most people haven't used something like Entity Framework either which is game changing level ORM. Massive productivity boost, and LINQ rivals SQL itself in that you can write very small yet powerful queries equivalent to much more complex and powerful SQL.
ORMs come with a lot of baggage that I prefer to avoid, but it probably depends on the domain. Take an e-commerce store with faceted search. You're pretty much going to write your own query builder if you don't use one off the shelf, seems like.
Every Oracle rep I've ever met said every app should be a SQL app.
I agree and have taken the same path.
I've been using django & duckdb together, which keeps me from using the ORM. Was this a happy accident for me? For background, I have a scientist background; I don't have as much experience w/ software and designing database apps.
The cargo-cult shibboleth of "never put business logic in your database" certainly didn't help, since a lot of developers just turned that into "never use stored procedures or views, your database is a dumb store with indexes."
Anytime this topic comes up, this opinion is invariably at the top of the comments. However I've never seen a non-trivial application made this way. Mind sharing one? More than the query generation, I think people reach for ORMs for static typing, mapping, migrations, transactions, etc.
I'm not doubting that it can be done, I'm just curious to see how it's done.