In particular, have you have to do testing, security (eg. row level security), manage migrations, change management (eg. for SOC2 or other security frameworks), cache offloads (Redis, and friends), support for microservices, etc.
Comments like this give me a vibe of young developers trying out Supabase for the first time feeling like that approach can scale indefinitely.
Before you tell me about how you just use a Query Builder/DSL and a object mapper for convenience: That's a freaking ORM!
With SQL you need to explicitly test all queries where the shape granularity is down to field level.
When you map data onto an object model (in the dto sense, not oop sense) you have bigger building blocks.
This gives a simpler application that is more reliable.
Obviously you need to pick a performant orm - and it seems a lot of people in these threads have been traumatized.
Personally, I run a complex application where developers freely use a graphql schema and requests are below 50ms p99 - gql in translated into joins by the orm, so we do not have any n+1 issues, etc.
I've most often seen this countered through data loaders (batched queries that are merged in code) instead of joins, or query whitelists.
You realize that’s abysmally bad performance for any reasonable OLTP query, right? Sub-msec (as measured by the DB, not including RTT etc.) is very achievable, even at scale. 2-3 msec for complex queries.
Sql migrations? This is a solved problem: https://github.com/flyway/flyway
What about micro services? You write some terraform to provision a sql database (e.g. aws aurora) just like you would with dynamo db or similar. What does that have to do with ORMs?
What about redis? Suddenly we need an ORM to query redis, to check if a key exists in the cache before hitting our DB? That’s difficult code to write?
I’m confused reading your comment. It has “you don’t do things my way so you must be dumb and playing with toy projects” vibes.
Alternatively you use record style outputs, but that is prone to errors if positions are changed.
Regardless, even with jooq you still accept that there is a sizable application layer to take responsibility of the requirements I listed.
In our project we generated pojo’s in a CI pipeline, corresponding to a new flyway migration script. The pojos were pushed to a dedicated maven library. This ensured our object mappings were always up to date. And then we wrote sql almost like the old fashioned way…but with a typesafe java DSL.
I don’t think so. The context is about avoiding joining in memory, which is fairly awful to do in a application, and should be avoided, along with uninformed use of ORMs, which often just add a layer of unwarranted complexity leading to things like the dreaded N+1 problem that most inexperienced Rails developers had when dealing with ActiveRecord.
If anything, what you’re talking about sounds like development hell. I can understand a database developer having to bake in support for that level of security, but developing an app that actually uses it gets you so far in the weeds that you can barely make progress trying to do normal development.
A developer with several years of experience or equivalent will have pride in developing complexity and using cool features that make them feel important.
After a developer has maybe twice that many years experience or equivalent, they may develop frameworks with the intent to make code easier to develop and manage.
And beyond that level of experience, developers just want code that’s easy to maintain and doesn’t make stupid decisions like excessive complexity. But, they know they have to let the younger devs make mistakes, because they don’t listen, so there is no choice but to watch hell burn.
Then you retire or get a different job.
I am merely talking about properties of developing complex web applications that have traditionally not been easy to work with in SQL.
I am in particular not proposing any frameworks.
How can that sound like hell?
