5 ms·

Out of those, though, I have to blame document DBs (and the start of NoSQL craze) on Rails :( To cut a long story short, Active Record (especially at the time)

by p_l 5y ago

Out of those, though, I have to blame document DBs (and the start of NoSQL craze) on Rails :( To cut a long story short, Active Record (especially at the time) wasn't super keen on generating super good SQL that would do as much as possible in database, and Ruby 1.9 arrived with stable ordered hashes. Then someone implemented basic ActiveRecord wrapper on top of key/value store (I think it started with Berkeley DB or similar), and from there NoSQL was off to the races as "new hip thing"[1] [1] Meanwhile IBM IMS has been selling pretty well for last 40 years at the time ;)

tinco 5y ago
I don't fully understand your argument. Document DB's never fully got traction in the Rails community. Then Node.JS became popular because it did concurrent IO better, and it put document DB's front and center for no apparent reason.
- p_l 5y ago
  It didn't get a lot of traction because it required some effort, but essentially the groups that jumped on them were also highly correlated with those that soon jumped to NodeJS, helped along with JSON serialization being rather obvious in JS context Though I would also consider their exodus to be a good thing for Rails ;)
LargeWu 5y ago
ActiveRecord was, even then, a much better ORM than exists in the Node world today. It was full featured and well hardened, and required basically no setup other than a class declaration. Plus, you could always drop down to the SQL if you needed to. Generally, it was a joy to use, and the performance was usually good enough. At some point, I gave up on even trying to use any Node ORM's because they were clunky and offered no value. It was easier to just drop straight to a knex session and write the queries natively.
- kkarimi 5y ago
  You should check what Prisma team has been doing lately
- Footkerchief 5y ago
  Objection (knex-based) is well designed and maintained. It clearly takes inspiration from ActiveRecord. It's light-years ahead of Sequelize in usability and footgun avoidance.
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  Oh man, so much this - TypeORM is such a disaster when you know how to write SQL. So many times fighting with TypeORM I thought “I’d be done by now if I just write the SQL directly”

by p_l 5y ago

tinco 5y ago

I don't fully understand your argument. Document DB's never fully got traction in the Rails community. Then Node.JS became popular because it did concurrent IO better, and it put document DB's front and center for no apparent reason.

p_l 5y ago
It didn't get a lot of traction because it required some effort, but essentially the groups that jumped on them were also highly correlated with those that soon jumped to NodeJS, helped along with JSON serialization being rather obvious in JS context Though I would also consider their exodus to be a good thing for Rails ;)

LargeWu 5y ago

ActiveRecord was, even then, a much better ORM than exists in the Node world today. It was full featured and well hardened, and required basically no setup other than a class declaration. Plus, you could always drop down to the SQL if you needed to. Generally, it was a joy to use, and the performance was usually good enough. At some point, I gave up on even trying to use any Node ORM's because they were clunky and offered no value. It was easier to just drop straight to a knex session and write the queries natively.

kkarimi 5y ago
You should check what Prisma team has been doing lately
Footkerchief 5y ago
Objection (knex-based) is well designed and maintained. It clearly takes inspiration from ActiveRecord. It's light-years ahead of Sequelize in usability and footgun avoidance.
simonbarker87 5y ago
Oh man, so much this - TypeORM is such a disaster when you know how to write SQL. So many times fighting with TypeORM I thought “I’d be done by now if I just write the SQL directly”