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hatefulheart • yesterday at 4:03 PM • 6 replies • view on HN

I have seen many ORM enjoyers argue the point about “you can just use SQL!” but I have never once seen an ORM enjoyer allow it, much less do it themselves in an actual codebase. They will time and time again prefer you write 100 lines of Typescript/Python for what could be achieved with 15 lines of SQL.

Replies

smw • today at 5:09 PM

Even the 'worst' of the ORMs (according to the people in these threads) makes this very easy:

  users = User.find_by_sql(<<~SQL)
    SELECT users.*,
           COUNT(posts.id) AS posts_count
    FROM users
    LEFT JOIN posts ON posts.user_id = users.id
    GROUP BY users.id
    HAVING COUNT(posts.id) > 10
  SQL

  users.first.posts_count
  # => 17
jghn • yesterday at 4:15 PM

To make matters worse, most of the time I've successfully argued a project to just use SQL instead of an ORM, what has happened is that people over time built a home rolled ORM in the development language.

It's like people can't just let go.

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zadikian • yesterday at 4:35 PM

And then the 100 lines of JS/Py ends up being way slower than the manual SQL, plus the autogen'd SQL part of it is slow, plus you can't even get the SQL query to profile without running the actual thing with prints.

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pjmlp • yesterday at 4:19 PM

Worse, that code will be executed on the receiving end, and waste a bunch of network traffic.

nfw2 • yesterday at 4:15 PM

The reason given to use raw SQL is for the performance not the perceived code clarity.

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7bit • yesterday at 4:46 PM

Great anecdote. Doesn't validate your claim

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