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This is reflective of my experience with the ORM zealots as well... SQL is already an abstraction, and it happens to be one of the most well thought out, battle
by jtdev 7y ago
This is reflective of my experience with the ORM zealots as well... SQL is already an abstraction, and it happens to be one of the most well thought out, battle tested abstractions we have in the software world... it drives me nuts when junior devs and devs with poor SQL abilities want to pollute a codebase with EF, Hibernate, etc. without understanding if it’s necessary or even helpful beyond simply allowing the developer to continue onward without spending time becoming proficient in SQL. That said, there are scenarios where an ORM is helpful, but I personally find those occasions to be the exception.
- ajross 7y ago> SQL is already an abstraction Still a leaky one, though. Sure, the syntax likes to pretend that you "just describe what you want", but in practice getting queries on large data sets to perform well involves layers of optimization, all the way down to deciding on how data is partitioned between storage backends and what the on-disk format of it and its indexes needs to be. In fact I view SQL as a somewhat thin abstraction, with a bunch of unavoidable (or at least unavoided) holes. Maybe that's part of the reason it's been so successful.