3 ms·

This is bad advice. An ORM is a useful tool for smoothing over the generation of queries and their conversion into object graphs, and make sense for many use ca

This is bad advice. An ORM is a useful tool for smoothing over the generation of queries and their conversion into object graphs, and make sense for many use cases. It is true that using them effectively still requires knowing the underlying database technology, but that is a given - they are not meant to supplant that knowledge. I will say though that every time I have encountered a codebase developed by a fanatically anti-ORM developer, it has contained a bug-riddled implementation of a half of an application-specific ORM anyway…

jerf 7y ago
"An ORM is a useful tool for smoothing over the generation of queries and their conversion into object graphs, and make sense for many use cases." I'm finding it's more powerful to have some language convenient query generator + query -> basic data structure + basic data structure -> final data structure broken into three separate parts, instead of bound together monolithically as most ORMs do it. Those steps are all useful on their own merits, but it's really quite frequent that for some specific task the prepackaged monolithic ORM is not what I need; either I need to tweak the query, or I want to get a basic data structure from some other source (JSON or something) and want to be able to reuse the logic, or I need a tweak to how I'm processing it down to an object (e.g., processing it into a class that is standalone vs. one that is integrated with the rest of the world, the "banana vs. a jungle containing a gorilla holding a banana" sort of thing Joe Armstrong talked about), or I want to create data structures from a complex query involving joins, aggregates, etc. that I can't necessarily express as "a class that represents a table" or something. It's not the three tools that are the problem; it's the inflexibility of jamming them all together in one shot, along with the semantic contradictions encountered while trying to make one class be the query generator, the basic data structure representing the query, and the "final" data structure, all at once, even before we consider the affordance of the ORM that really, really encourages you to make DB structures to OO classes instead of queries.
- rlpb 7y ago
  Have you looked into sqlalchemy? I think it would meet some of your requirements; I'm not sure about the rest.
  - jerf 7y ago
    It is one of my favorites, yes, but alas, only works when I'm in Python, which for me personally is not very often. YMMV.

jerf 7y ago

"An ORM is a useful tool for smoothing over the generation of queries and their conversion into object graphs, and make sense for many use cases." I'm finding it's more powerful to have some language convenient query generator + query -> basic data structure + basic data structure -> final data structure broken into three separate parts, instead of bound together monolithically as most ORMs do it. Those steps are all useful on their own merits, but it's really quite frequent that for some specific task the prepackaged monolithic ORM is not what I need; either I need to tweak the query, or I want to get a basic data structure from some other source (JSON or something) and want to be able to reuse the logic, or I need a tweak to how I'm processing it down to an object (e.g., processing it into a class that is standalone vs. one that is integrated with the rest of the world, the "banana vs. a jungle containing a gorilla holding a banana" sort of thing Joe Armstrong talked about), or I want to create data structures from a complex query involving joins, aggregates, etc. that I can't necessarily express as "a class that represents a table" or something. It's not the three tools that are the problem; it's the inflexibility of jamming them all together in one shot, along with the semantic contradictions encountered while trying to make one class be the query generator, the basic data structure representing the query, and the "final" data structure, all at once, even before we consider the affordance of the ORM that really, really encourages you to make DB structures to OO classes instead of queries.

rlpb 7y ago
Have you looked into sqlalchemy? I think it would meet some of your requirements; I'm not sure about the rest.
- jerf 7y ago
  It is one of my favorites, yes, but alas, only works when I'm in Python, which for me personally is not very often. YMMV.