4 ms·

My problem with ORMs is that they feel like overkill for small apps, and they merely get in your way with large apps. And I have yet to be on a project with Hib

My problem with ORMs is that they feel like overkill for small apps, and they merely get in your way with large apps. And I have yet to be on a project with Hibernate where they were using the caching and really understood what they were doing.

edejong 8y ago
Well, I once worked on a 1 MLOC (as far as that’s relevant) high school SaaS administration system providing services for a large chunk of the Dutch market. Hibernate, EHcache and cache synchronization across applications (with an Electronic Learning Environment) all worked well. The team of 12 developers with a small minority had expert knowledge in Hibernate and cache management. The biggest problem I often see in large DB systems is the lack of proper normalization, leading to very wide tables and subsequently causing performance problems (both due to reduced scanning speed and ORMs tendency to just pull in all attributes of selected rows). Another problem with Hibernate is the proper demarcation of transactional boundaries, causing DB inconsistencies. Very important to get right. I could go on, but then this would become a blog post. In any case, I feel that a functional mapping over the SQL AST and result sets using Scala and Slick (for example) leads to much higher versatility, places computation closer to storage and provides better abstraction possibilities. This, in turn, reduces the complexity of the middle layer.
- wwweston 8y ago
  > a small minority had expert knowledge in Hibernate and cache management. How does Hibernate as a project (or the community around it) develop people who have expert knowledge in it and/or general cache management?
  - edejong 8y ago
    It doesn’t! Most was self taught by reading sources and some O’Reilly books. Community support was rather marginal at the time when true technicalities were discussed. Same as Stack Overflow now: loads of people with superficial knowledge, but very few with in-depth or architectural technical prowess. Unfortunately, those ppl are often too occupied to scan the SO posts and a simple answer skimming the true ideas often wins the accepted answer instead.

edejong 8y ago

Well, I once worked on a 1 MLOC (as far as that’s relevant) high school SaaS administration system providing services for a large chunk of the Dutch market. Hibernate, EHcache and cache synchronization across applications (with an Electronic Learning Environment) all worked well. The team of 12 developers with a small minority had expert knowledge in Hibernate and cache management. The biggest problem I often see in large DB systems is the lack of proper normalization, leading to very wide tables and subsequently causing performance problems (both due to reduced scanning speed and ORMs tendency to just pull in all attributes of selected rows). Another problem with Hibernate is the proper demarcation of transactional boundaries, causing DB inconsistencies. Very important to get right. I could go on, but then this would become a blog post. In any case, I feel that a functional mapping over the SQL AST and result sets using Scala and Slick (for example) leads to much higher versatility, places computation closer to storage and provides better abstraction possibilities. This, in turn, reduces the complexity of the middle layer.

wwweston 8y ago
> a small minority had expert knowledge in Hibernate and cache management. How does Hibernate as a project (or the community around it) develop people who have expert knowledge in it and/or general cache management?
- edejong 8y ago
  It doesn’t! Most was self taught by reading sources and some O’Reilly books. Community support was rather marginal at the time when true technicalities were discussed. Same as Stack Overflow now: loads of people with superficial knowledge, but very few with in-depth or architectural technical prowess. Unfortunately, those ppl are often too occupied to scan the SO posts and a simple answer skimming the true ideas often wins the accepted answer instead.