alt Hacker News>ORMs being a forcing function for domain modeling is enough benefit for me that it outweighs all of their obvious limitations.
That was a surprising take!
I know only a few ORM's but it seems they end up just adding another layer of DTO objects that are entirely separate from the domain classes anyway. So best case the ORM is just a detour for a good domain model. Worst case it creates a weird database-contaminated domain model that's hellish to maintain.
So I would't say ORMs force domain modeling, or even help. Are you perhaps thinking of a particular stack where the ORM is just one part of it?
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Mh, in NHibernate when properly modelled, your Domain classes usually match the database/tables, so there is no need to have additional DTOs
> I know only a few ORM's but it seems they end up just adding another layer of DTO objects that are entirely separate from the domain classes anyway.
Entity Framework in particular has come a long way in this regard. Particularly owned & complex entities, value converters, etc.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/modeling/
> Worst case it creates a weird database-contaminated domain model that's hellish to maintain.
CQRS is good for this because it forces you into using a different write and read model. My write models are domain objects and my read models are DTOs that feed the UI and via projection I can shape them without issue.
Why is your database so different from your domain?