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Manually writing queries has a lot of overhead cost. Your entire application now has the UI directly tied to what the query returns. You can make intermediate c

Manually writing queries has a lot of overhead cost. Your entire application now has the UI directly tied to what the query returns. You can make intermediate classes to separate the two but eventually you'll end up making a worse ORM you need to test and maintain. What an ORM gives you is a tunable level of abstraction. I know Ruby on Rails best so I'll use it as an example. ActiveRecord has a lot of tuning you can do, like partial selects and snippets of sql where you need it. If that isn't enough, there is find_by_sql as an escape hatch. If that is still not fast enough, you can call ActiveRecord::Base.connection and skip the ORM entirely. This will keep complexity limited to places where it needs to be complex. In my experience, every level of optimization you do comes with decreasing maintainability.

randomdata 3y ago
> Your entire application now has the UI directly tied to what the query returns. Not really. Without ORM, your entire application is now tied to sets of tuples (i.e. relations) instead of rich graph structures (i.e. objects), but the relation need not be equal to the relation returned by the query. You could still have a transformation from one relation to another. Not since the PHP days of embedding MySQL calls right in the middle of HTML have I seen anyone carry relations from end-to-end, though. The idea that anyone is not doing ORM these days seems like a straw man.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > Not really. Without ORM, your entire application is now tied to relations (i.e. sets of tuples) instead of rich graph structures (i.e. objects), but the relation need not be equal to the relation returned by the query. And, in some edge-cases, the relation is more useful than the object graph.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  Depends. Clojure uses objects rarely. But still has really powerful abstractions for writing applications quickly.

randomdata 3y ago

> Your entire application now has the UI directly tied to what the query returns. Not really. Without ORM, your entire application is now tied to sets of tuples (i.e. relations) instead of rich graph structures (i.e. objects), but the relation need not be equal to the relation returned by the query. You could still have a transformation from one relation to another. Not since the PHP days of embedding MySQL calls right in the middle of HTML have I seen anyone carry relations from end-to-end, though. The idea that anyone is not doing ORM these days seems like a straw man.

lelanthran 3y ago
> Not really. Without ORM, your entire application is now tied to relations (i.e. sets of tuples) instead of rich graph structures (i.e. objects), but the relation need not be equal to the relation returned by the query. And, in some edge-cases, the relation is more useful than the object graph.
jimbokun 3y ago
Depends. Clojure uses objects rarely. But still has really powerful abstractions for writing applications quickly.