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> with users using higher level languages (e.g. "ORMs") to hide the nastinesses Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong my whole career because every project I’ve worke

by Swizec 3y ago

> with users using higher level languages (e.g. "ORMs") to hide the nastinesses Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong my whole career because every project I’ve worked with the engineers eventually said ”Screw this leaky abstraction. Having to know SQL _and_ how the ORM works on top is too much, we’ll just put everything in an ORM.rawQuery(…)”

magicalhippo 3y ago
We prefer writing our own SELECTs so we have more predictable performance, also it makes debugging production issues easier. A poor ORM-generated query might be fast enough during testing but crashes and burns when it hits client's database. Not us, but a perfect example was the recent story discussed here[1] on optimizing an ORM-generated query to get 1200x speedup. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40069583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40069583
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
100%. I've come to believe that essentially every software engineer, if they write software long enough, comes to despise ORMs. As I always say "They make the easy stuff a little easier, and they make the harder stuff way harder". I have yet to see an ORM actually save me time in the long run; most of the time it just feels like I'm battling it. SQL definitely has its warts, but I don't feel like ORMs make it possible to ignore those warts at all. I'd love it if a better language like PRQL was accepted by DB engines and just compiled to SQL in the DB. Was a good blog post a couple years ago that I think highlights a lot of problems with ORMs and query builders: https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf410349856c https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf41...
- smaudet 3y ago
  I too think ORM was the wrong approach. I still enjoy SQLite - its not perfect, but every time I see it being used I get the warm and fuzzies. We should have just built better libraries around using/targeting one flavor (SQLite, e.g.), instead of wasting time with bad libraries that transformed one bit of bad code to another bit of bad code and ran it on a database engine that wasn't even doing it right... When you solve a problem, you solve it at its source, not five miles away with a teleprompter. If relational algebra is what we should all have been using, then relational algebra is what we should have been optimizing for, not overpriced SQL database engines. To shamelessly steal from another comment here: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-relational-algebra-is-math/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-re... https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-sql-is-syntactic-sugar-for-relational-algebra/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-sq...

by Swizec 3y ago

magicalhippo 3y ago

We prefer writing our own SELECTs so we have more predictable performance, also it makes debugging production issues easier. A poor ORM-generated query might be fast enough during testing but crashes and burns when it hits client's database. Not us, but a perfect example was the recent story discussed here[1] on optimizing an ORM-generated query to get 1200x speedup. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40069583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40069583

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

100%. I've come to believe that essentially every software engineer, if they write software long enough, comes to despise ORMs. As I always say "They make the easy stuff a little easier, and they make the harder stuff way harder". I have yet to see an ORM actually save me time in the long run; most of the time it just feels like I'm battling it. SQL definitely has its warts, but I don't feel like ORMs make it possible to ignore those warts at all. I'd love it if a better language like PRQL was accepted by DB engines and just compiled to SQL in the DB. Was a good blog post a couple years ago that I think highlights a lot of problems with ORMs and query builders: https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf410349856c https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf41...

smaudet 3y ago
I too think ORM was the wrong approach. I still enjoy SQLite - its not perfect, but every time I see it being used I get the warm and fuzzies. We should have just built better libraries around using/targeting one flavor (SQLite, e.g.), instead of wasting time with bad libraries that transformed one bit of bad code to another bit of bad code and ran it on a database engine that wasn't even doing it right... When you solve a problem, you solve it at its source, not five miles away with a teleprompter. If relational algebra is what we should all have been using, then relational algebra is what we should have been optimizing for, not overpriced SQL database engines. To shamelessly steal from another comment here: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-relational-algebra-is-math/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-re... https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-sql-is-syntactic-sugar-for-relational-algebra/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/unexplanations-sq...