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I got my start in IT as a DBA. SQL and good table design come naturally. So when it came time to join a company as a developer I sprang for raw SQL only to find

I got my start in IT as a DBA. SQL and good table design come naturally. So when it came time to join a company as a developer I sprang for raw SQL only to find this SQLalchemy ORM. I couldn’t wrap my head around it at first. All the ceremony to get to what I wanted to do just got in the way. I felt trapped. But it’s ubiquitous and I have to adapt. So I’m learning. And there’s a whole lot of benefit being able to define a model and have it render on any database. Paired with Alembic migrations can be pretty simple. I miss having 100% control over the queries, knowing exactly how they looked and analyzing each before committing them to main. But nobody has the time to hand craft artisanal queries and leverage every intricate detail of a database when they’re trying to move ever faster and ship features.

WesleyJohnson 6y ago
Got my start in classic ASP and we authored so many queries using string concatenation. When ASP.NET came around, we shifted our database thinking to stored procedures, so I could continue to write "raw" SQL. I'm no DBA, but I learned so much about authoring efficient and complex queries - I genuinely love working with SQL. These days, though, I use Django's ORM. I can often get it to do what I want, bit it sure makes me miss raw queries. Thankfully, we still write the occasional view for complex joins and then just map that to a read-only model in Django - so I sometimes get the best of both worlds.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Yeah the shop I got my start in shipped .Net on the server and client side with stored procedures tied to that code on the DB side. So it was a sort of API abstraction that slowed devs to call update_users(...) from the app side and get raw sql performance and such. To a newbie like me at the time it may have been an old school approach but it made total sense. Pretty cool to see someone get a similar start to me. I’ve not played with the Django ORM yet. Still getting used to SQLalchemy.
  - WesleyJohnson 6y ago
    Exactly! It made total sense at the time, and still does to some degree. I'm sure SQLAlchemy is lovely, but after spending so much time with Django ORM, I'm finding it hard to shift my thinking any time I try to look at SA. I'm sure if I had started using SA first, the opposite would also be true, so we just took different paths. I'm guessing you'll enjoy SA if you love SQL, based on all the other comments I'm seeing.

WesleyJohnson 6y ago

Got my start in classic ASP and we authored so many queries using string concatenation. When ASP.NET came around, we shifted our database thinking to stored procedures, so I could continue to write "raw" SQL. I'm no DBA, but I learned so much about authoring efficient and complex queries - I genuinely love working with SQL. These days, though, I use Django's ORM. I can often get it to do what I want, bit it sure makes me miss raw queries. Thankfully, we still write the occasional view for complex joins and then just map that to a read-only model in Django - so I sometimes get the best of both worlds.

gigatexal 6y ago
Yeah the shop I got my start in shipped .Net on the server and client side with stored procedures tied to that code on the DB side. So it was a sort of API abstraction that slowed devs to call update_users(...) from the app side and get raw sql performance and such. To a newbie like me at the time it may have been an old school approach but it made total sense. Pretty cool to see someone get a similar start to me. I’ve not played with the Django ORM yet. Still getting used to SQLalchemy.
- WesleyJohnson 6y ago
  Exactly! It made total sense at the time, and still does to some degree. I'm sure SQLAlchemy is lovely, but after spending so much time with Django ORM, I'm finding it hard to shift my thinking any time I try to look at SA. I'm sure if I had started using SA first, the opposite would also be true, so we just took different paths. I'm guessing you'll enjoy SA if you love SQL, based on all the other comments I'm seeing.