4 ms·

I agree with a lot of what the author has to say. Is it a coincidence that every project that used an ORM I've worked on in my 10 years experience has ended up

I agree with a lot of what the author has to say. Is it a coincidence that every project that used an ORM I've worked on in my 10 years experience has ended up a mess? I end up spending more time troubleshooting and asking the "why is it generating these queries?" and trying to hack ActiveRecord to get it to do what I want. I'm sure we have all had that moment where we actually have the SQL query already written and now face the task of trying to convince the ORM to just do what you want, while trying to conform to whatever horrible and leaky API they have created. A few hours later, after scouring StackOverflow, Google and wading through abstraction upon abstraction base classes you realize you're so far away from your original problem at this point, and you need to go home, so you just get the damn database driver and execute the query, what you could have done in the first place. You feel defeated and hope the others don't shun you for your "improper" use of the ORM. Or maybe you do find a clever way of hacking what you need to do in the ORM, but a lot of the time I just don't care anymore to make things fit in someone else's' poor design.

wvenable 10y ago
This is a psychological problem not a technical one. If you've already written the SQL the right choice is to use that and not translate it into the ORM. The other way is madness, which you know, but you don't accept it. An ORM is supposed to save you time. And it does. For the bulk of database interaction an ORM will save you a lot of effort. But it's not the be-all-end-all. It has limitations. And when you hit those limitations, you just don't use it. This isn't a huge strike against ORMs in general because every technical choice is a trade off. You just have to accept that it is a trade off. And because it's a trade off, sometimes it'll be the wrong choice for a task. I've been in your situation and I happily add the SQL to the model directly and go back to my day. I don't worry that I didn't use the ORM. It's there to help me, not hurt me.
- iamleppert 10y ago
  I guess I'm just not sure exactly what, save for trivial queries the ORM is actually good at abstracting? We can all write simple queries with simple joins (I hope), that doesn't really save much time. In my experience anything more than a trivial model with a boiler-plate relation it becomes not worth it...
  - wvenable 10y ago
    ORMs are good for manipulating complex object models and doing mostly trivial queries. However, the vast majority of queries are trivial. Maybe 2-5% of queries or bulk modifications can't be easily modeled. The result is still huge savings in time, effort, and code. Also, if you're basing your entire understanding of ORMs on ActiveRecord, you're missing out on a lot.

wvenable 10y ago

This is a psychological problem not a technical one. If you've already written the SQL the right choice is to use that and not translate it into the ORM. The other way is madness, which you know, but you don't accept it. An ORM is supposed to save you time. And it does. For the bulk of database interaction an ORM will save you a lot of effort. But it's not the be-all-end-all. It has limitations. And when you hit those limitations, you just don't use it. This isn't a huge strike against ORMs in general because every technical choice is a trade off. You just have to accept that it is a trade off. And because it's a trade off, sometimes it'll be the wrong choice for a task. I've been in your situation and I happily add the SQL to the model directly and go back to my day. I don't worry that I didn't use the ORM. It's there to help me, not hurt me.

iamleppert 10y ago
I guess I'm just not sure exactly what, save for trivial queries the ORM is actually good at abstracting? We can all write simple queries with simple joins (I hope), that doesn't really save much time. In my experience anything more than a trivial model with a boiler-plate relation it becomes not worth it...
- wvenable 10y ago
  ORMs are good for manipulating complex object models and doing mostly trivial queries. However, the vast majority of queries are trivial. Maybe 2-5% of queries or bulk modifications can't be easily modeled. The result is still huge savings in time, effort, and code. Also, if you're basing your entire understanding of ORMs on ActiveRecord, you're missing out on a lot.