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> "you don't need to know SQL" Who is making those claims? Really? I've used Hibernate probably about as long as you have, and to me: it's fine. Is it perfect?

> "you don't need to know SQL" Who is making those claims? Really? I've used Hibernate probably about as long as you have, and to me: it's fine. Is it perfect? Of course not, but if I have to make the trade-off between Hibernate (or nowadays Spring Data) or rolling my own abstraction to interact with the database, for any kind of non-trivial application, I would not roll my own. When you roll your own, you know what you're doing: still ORM! And like with many things: date and time zone math, encryption, writing databases, and ORM, if you can pull in a specialized tool, you can focus on your core business, and don't have to become an expert in a field that's not your core business.

john-radio 3y ago
This year happens to be the first year when I worked with SQL enough to say that I know my ass from a hole in the ground in the language, and my job title is Senior Backend Developer and I have 11 years in tech and 5 as a developer. My journey with SQL is basically the GIF of Colin Farrell running in circles avoiding the violent American tourist in In Bruges; I have some good qualities as a developer but diligence in learning SQL is not one of them.
- antonvs 3y ago
  I learned SQL many many years ago using Microsoft Access. It has (or at least had, I don’t know how it’s changed) a great visual query builder which would generate and run the SQL for you. Seeing what SQL it generated, and the data it produced from the diagram I had created, was really helpful in learning interactively. Any tool that does this (well enough) should help a lot.
freetime2 3y ago
It’s frustrating to see “not needing to know SQL” as supposed reason for using an ORM. If you don’t have a decent foundational knowledge of SQL and relational DBs, of course you are going to have a bad time with ORMs. ORMs can help you to write less SQL, and less boilerplate for getting data in and out of the database. But pretty soon you’re going to need to debug something, and without a solid understanding of DBs and SQL, you’re going to be hopelessly lost.

john-radio 3y ago

This year happens to be the first year when I worked with SQL enough to say that I know my ass from a hole in the ground in the language, and my job title is Senior Backend Developer and I have 11 years in tech and 5 as a developer. My journey with SQL is basically the GIF of Colin Farrell running in circles avoiding the violent American tourist in In Bruges; I have some good qualities as a developer but diligence in learning SQL is not one of them.

antonvs 3y ago
I learned SQL many many years ago using Microsoft Access. It has (or at least had, I don’t know how it’s changed) a great visual query builder which would generate and run the SQL for you. Seeing what SQL it generated, and the data it produced from the diagram I had created, was really helpful in learning interactively. Any tool that does this (well enough) should help a lot.

freetime2 3y ago

It’s frustrating to see “not needing to know SQL” as supposed reason for using an ORM. If you don’t have a decent foundational knowledge of SQL and relational DBs, of course you are going to have a bad time with ORMs. ORMs can help you to write less SQL, and less boilerplate for getting data in and out of the database. But pretty soon you’re going to need to debug something, and without a solid understanding of DBs and SQL, you’re going to be hopelessly lost.