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> ORMs are a bad idea in the first place: relations are a great way to organise your data, why would you want to sully that by converting to something object or

> ORMs are a bad idea in the first place: relations are a great way to organise your data, why would you want to sully that by converting to something object oriented? One big why is SQL. It's a horrible language/API but sadly practically all relational databases are SQL.

sgarland 2y ago
So horrible that it’s been the standard for 50+ years. The relational model is great. Embrace it, because it isn’t going anywhere.
- jampekka 2y ago
  Relational model is good, SQL is not. They are not the same thing.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    Short of academic languages like D, nothing faithfully implements the relational model. Some compromises are necessary to make it useful for practical applications, hence SQL.
    - eru 2y ago
      Have you looked at Datalog recently? SQL has other warts, apart from not being completely relational.
CraigJPerry 2y ago
This is the nail on the head. I’m really not a fan of ORMs, I don’t think they save any time because to use them in a safe way, you NEED to fully understand the SQL that will be run. There’s no shortcut from this and it’s plainly just an extra step. I’ve been bitten too many times but one ironic problem is that they’re so damned reliable. 99.999% of the time your use of an ORM will be just fine. It can be hard to argue against sometimes even though that 0.001 time can be an extinction level event for the company. So if you need to understand the SQL that will be run anyway and ORMs occasionally introduce disastrous behaviour, why persist with them? Well to start with the obvious, SQL is not panacea, you can still be bitten with non-deterministic behaviour when you hand craft every query in sql (e.g. when was the last time you updated stats on that relation - will the optimizer select an appropriate strategy?). But a stronger reason is that some harder queries just suck to write correctly in SQL. Maybe you’re working with some kind of tree or graph and need a recursive common table expression: Enjoy! It might be better in most cases to write such a query at a higher level of abstraction (ORM) and take advantage of the more productive testing facilities.
eru 2y ago
I agree that SQL ain't great. You can model relations in your language without using SQL. (You could have a mapper from your internal modelling of joins etc to how you talk to your database.) In eg Haskell that works really well, but other languages are also flexible enough.

sgarland 2y ago

So horrible that it’s been the standard for 50+ years. The relational model is great. Embrace it, because it isn’t going anywhere.

jampekka 2y ago
Relational model is good, SQL is not. They are not the same thing.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Short of academic languages like D, nothing faithfully implements the relational model. Some compromises are necessary to make it useful for practical applications, hence SQL.
  - eru 2y ago
    Have you looked at Datalog recently? SQL has other warts, apart from not being completely relational.

CraigJPerry 2y ago

This is the nail on the head. I’m really not a fan of ORMs, I don’t think they save any time because to use them in a safe way, you NEED to fully understand the SQL that will be run. There’s no shortcut from this and it’s plainly just an extra step. I’ve been bitten too many times but one ironic problem is that they’re so damned reliable. 99.999% of the time your use of an ORM will be just fine. It can be hard to argue against sometimes even though that 0.001 time can be an extinction level event for the company. So if you need to understand the SQL that will be run anyway and ORMs occasionally introduce disastrous behaviour, why persist with them? Well to start with the obvious, SQL is not panacea, you can still be bitten with non-deterministic behaviour when you hand craft every query in sql (e.g. when was the last time you updated stats on that relation - will the optimizer select an appropriate strategy?). But a stronger reason is that some harder queries just suck to write correctly in SQL. Maybe you’re working with some kind of tree or graph and need a recursive common table expression: Enjoy! It might be better in most cases to write such a query at a higher level of abstraction (ORM) and take advantage of the more productive testing facilities.

eru 2y ago

I agree that SQL ain't great. You can model relations in your language without using SQL. (You could have a mapper from your internal modelling of joins etc to how you talk to your database.) In eg Haskell that works really well, but other languages are also flexible enough.