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> Additionally, SQL is extremely hard to compose. I've seen almost everyone who doesn't use SQL directly say this but I always feel it's the exact opposite. SQ

> Additionally, SQL is extremely hard to compose. I've seen almost everyone who doesn't use SQL directly say this but I always feel it's the exact opposite. SQL is easy to write once you do it enough. I've gotten to the point where I compose zero SQL in any application's code and, instead, do it all inside of stored procedures (of which they do not generate dynamic SQL). Then my code just calls stored procedures, my database users for the web application never have more access than executing a specific subset of stored procedures, and if there is a bug found in a stored procedure I can deploy them separately from the web application. I'm guessing it's just different philosophies but almost every time I've used something that abstracts an existing interface to another, completely different interface, I always end up running into major issues.

DannoHung 11y ago
SQL is hard to programatically compose. At the very least, you have to use a Lang/SQL.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  That's a new term to me - lang/SQL?
  - d215 11y ago
    I guess he means a procedural language for sql, like PL/Pyton, PL/V8, etc., so PL/
    - Pxtl 11y ago
      Oh god, ick. I've used T-SQL and Pl/SQL procedurally and hate them with the burning passion of many suns.
rabidferret 11y ago
Stored procedures are no more composeable than SQL strings are. Now it's certainly easy to say that I haven't used SQL directly. But I did spend years working that way (though of course this statement shouldn't give you much confidence by itself). Ultimately an ORM can help you to build more maintainable and resilient (to changing market conditions) software than direct SQL. Diesel in particular can catch mistakes that SQL strings cannot. I do understand why a lot of people have reservations about ORMs. I share a lot of them. I've maintained Active Record for about 2 years now, and learned a lot from doing so (note: This does not mean that I like AR or want this to be anything like it). TL;DR: Your points aren't wrong. Diesel is different. Maybe give it a shot. ;)
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > Stored procedures are no more composeable than SQL strings are[...]Ultimately an ORM can help you to build more maintainable and resilient (to changing market conditions) software than direct SQL. I couldn't disagree more. Creating the separation between SQL DB and web application allows you to maintain, deploy, fix and upgrade things independently and it's easy (maybe not quite as easy as an ORM would make it but not really harder either; you're going to have to know how SQL works anyway if you want to effectively optimize and secure your data). Not only that but you can provide far better security controls because you can limit certain users access to certain procedures, never direct access to tables and various other things and if you don't do any dynamic SQL in the procedures itself you not only never have to worry about SQL injection but unless there is a critical vulnerability in the SQL system itself it's going to be impossible to conduct an injection attack. Yeah you can separate your code to make it easier to deploy separately to get a similar benefit and yeah your code can prevent SQL injections too but it's so much more work, more possible points of failure and the differences between databases can really bite you in the ass when you do everything generically. SQL is fun :) > TL;DR: Your points aren't wrong. Diesel is different. Maybe give it a shot. ;) Yeah I'm not saying NEVER use ORMs; they're great for creating things quickly that don't need to scale. But after my experience with them I'm highly skeptical using them outside of that type of use case. Of course you can scale ORMs but I've never seen it done well.
  - rabidferret 11y ago
    I think we're violently agreeing in a lot of ways. :) I'm curious what you mean by scale. Are you referring to performance, or code size? If you're referring to performance, you'll probably find it interesting that we out-perform or are competitive with ideomatic C.
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      By scale I mean performance though I'm not sure the application's language matters as much as the SQL that's being generated and run against the database. I've just never had good luck with ORMs generating the best, most optimized SQL for the query I'm trying to run and I've known a few people who used an ORM until they started getting heavy traffic, tested out talking directly to the RDMS, found it to be more performant and end up dropping the ORM. Don't get me wrong ORMs can certainly be performant. I just haven't seen or know anyone who used it in a manner that scaled to thousands of concurrent users and, at the same time, didn't have a lot of pain trying to do that with the ORM.
skywhopper 11y ago
"Compose" here doesn't mean "to write". It means to build up a database query in multiple steps, gradually adding (or removing) restrictions or relations dynamically in response to input. So one method might add a certain restriction that will get translated to a part of the where clause. Another might change which fields are being selected for or joined on or add transformations to the field. Meanwhile, the developer doesn't have to worry about special cases, or whether you need an AND or an OR, or how to go about wrapping a field in the SELECT clause after the fact. These methods might be in totally different contexts in the underlying code, and it would not be possible to make that style of query composition possible without abstracting away the SQL syntax. And that's exactly what an ORM does for you.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Oh I know what compose means. Having written a ton of stored procedures for large scale web applications I've never found the need to dynamically build such queries. Instead I focus on what I need a specific query to do, provide the options to a stored procedure or function (depending on the RDMS) and that's it. Much like unix with simple programs that do very niche things I look at procedures much the same way. Don't get me wrong I see the simplicity in it from the ORM side I've just never had a good experience with ORM tools. Having worked directly against many RDMS and key value stores at least for me I don't see much value in them. But anything that helps get a product out the door more power to ya, in my opinion.
  - barrkel 11y ago
    What do you do when you want e.g. user controlled sorting and filtering? I just implemented this recently in my job, but it was even tougher than that; I was joining dynamically created tables, and the number of joins depended on criteria. I ended up building my own AST to represent filters, and compiling to SQL. Every extra table join hurts performance - typically filters are implented as joins against a filtered sorted limited subquery returning ids, so fewer different table joins means less data to pull in when evaluating filters even when all the data is needed for the results page. Point being, I had to compose complex dynamic queries and SQL was not a particularly pleasant target language to target directly. Abstractions (like asts) help with composition.

DannoHung 11y ago

SQL is hard to programatically compose. At the very least, you have to use a Lang/SQL.

Pxtl 11y ago
That's a new term to me - lang/SQL?
- d215 11y ago
  I guess he means a procedural language for sql, like PL/Pyton, PL/V8, etc., so PL/
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    Oh god, ick. I've used T-SQL and Pl/SQL procedurally and hate them with the burning passion of many suns.

rabidferret 11y ago

Stored procedures are no more composeable than SQL strings are. Now it's certainly easy to say that I haven't used SQL directly. But I did spend years working that way (though of course this statement shouldn't give you much confidence by itself). Ultimately an ORM can help you to build more maintainable and resilient (to changing market conditions) software than direct SQL. Diesel in particular can catch mistakes that SQL strings cannot. I do understand why a lot of people have reservations about ORMs. I share a lot of them. I've maintained Active Record for about 2 years now, and learned a lot from doing so (note: This does not mean that I like AR or want this to be anything like it). TL;DR: Your points aren't wrong. Diesel is different. Maybe give it a shot. ;)

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> Stored procedures are no more composeable than SQL strings are[...]Ultimately an ORM can help you to build more maintainable and resilient (to changing market conditions) software than direct SQL. I couldn't disagree more. Creating the separation between SQL DB and web application allows you to maintain, deploy, fix and upgrade things independently and it's easy (maybe not quite as easy as an ORM would make it but not really harder either; you're going to have to know how SQL works anyway if you want to effectively optimize and secure your data). Not only that but you can provide far better security controls because you can limit certain users access to certain procedures, never direct access to tables and various other things and if you don't do any dynamic SQL in the procedures itself you not only never have to worry about SQL injection but unless there is a critical vulnerability in the SQL system itself it's going to be impossible to conduct an injection attack. Yeah you can separate your code to make it easier to deploy separately to get a similar benefit and yeah your code can prevent SQL injections too but it's so much more work, more possible points of failure and the differences between databases can really bite you in the ass when you do everything generically. SQL is fun :) > TL;DR: Your points aren't wrong. Diesel is different. Maybe give it a shot. ;) Yeah I'm not saying NEVER use ORMs; they're great for creating things quickly that don't need to scale. But after my experience with them I'm highly skeptical using them outside of that type of use case. Of course you can scale ORMs but I've never seen it done well.
- rabidferret 11y ago
  I think we're violently agreeing in a lot of ways. :) I'm curious what you mean by scale. Are you referring to performance, or code size? If you're referring to performance, you'll probably find it interesting that we out-perform or are competitive with ideomatic C.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    By scale I mean performance though I'm not sure the application's language matters as much as the SQL that's being generated and run against the database. I've just never had good luck with ORMs generating the best, most optimized SQL for the query I'm trying to run and I've known a few people who used an ORM until they started getting heavy traffic, tested out talking directly to the RDMS, found it to be more performant and end up dropping the ORM. Don't get me wrong ORMs can certainly be performant. I just haven't seen or know anyone who used it in a manner that scaled to thousands of concurrent users and, at the same time, didn't have a lot of pain trying to do that with the ORM.

skywhopper 11y ago

"Compose" here doesn't mean "to write". It means to build up a database query in multiple steps, gradually adding (or removing) restrictions or relations dynamically in response to input. So one method might add a certain restriction that will get translated to a part of the where clause. Another might change which fields are being selected for or joined on or add transformations to the field. Meanwhile, the developer doesn't have to worry about special cases, or whether you need an AND or an OR, or how to go about wrapping a field in the SELECT clause after the fact. These methods might be in totally different contexts in the underlying code, and it would not be possible to make that style of query composition possible without abstracting away the SQL syntax. And that's exactly what an ORM does for you.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Oh I know what compose means. Having written a ton of stored procedures for large scale web applications I've never found the need to dynamically build such queries. Instead I focus on what I need a specific query to do, provide the options to a stored procedure or function (depending on the RDMS) and that's it. Much like unix with simple programs that do very niche things I look at procedures much the same way. Don't get me wrong I see the simplicity in it from the ORM side I've just never had a good experience with ORM tools. Having worked directly against many RDMS and key value stores at least for me I don't see much value in them. But anything that helps get a product out the door more power to ya, in my opinion.
- barrkel 11y ago
  What do you do when you want e.g. user controlled sorting and filtering? I just implemented this recently in my job, but it was even tougher than that; I was joining dynamically created tables, and the number of joins depended on criteria. I ended up building my own AST to represent filters, and compiling to SQL. Every extra table join hurts performance - typically filters are implented as joins against a filtered sorted limited subquery returning ids, so fewer different table joins means less data to pull in when evaluating filters even when all the data is needed for the results page. Point being, I had to compose complex dynamic queries and SQL was not a particularly pleasant target language to target directly. Abstractions (like asts) help with composition.