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0 pointsmattmanser10mo ago0 comments

Most ORMs will happily let you map stored procedures and views to a class, you can have as many models as you want. So your point doesn't really make sense.

The author's said nothing about ORMs. It feels like you're trying to post a personal beef about ORMs that's entirely against the "pragmatic" software design engineering the author's opining. Using ORMs to massively reduce your boiler-plate CRUD code, then using raw SQL (or raw SQL + ORM doing the column mapping) for everything else is a pragmatic design choice.

You might not like them, but using ORMs for CRUD saves a ton of boilerplate, error-prone, code. Yes, you can footgun yourself. But that's what being a senior developer is all about, using the tools you have pragmatically and not foot gunning yourself.

And it's just looking for the patterns, if you see a massive ORM query, you're probably seeing a code smell. A query that should be in raw SQL.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

dondraper3610mo ago· 1 in thread

In Go, for example, there is a mixed approach of pgx + sqlc, which is basically a combo of the best Postgres driver + type-safe code generator (based on raw SQL).

https://brandur.org/sqlc

Even though I often use pgx only, for a new project, I would use the approach above.

DanielHB10mo ago

I did some exploratory analysis on sqlc some time ago and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to parametrize which column to sort-by and group-by in queries.

It is quite neat, but I don't think it actually replaces a proper ORM for when ORMs are actually useful for. That on top of all the codegen pitfalls.

I personally quite like the Prisma approach which doesn't map database data to objects, but rather just returns an array of tuples based on your query (and no lazy loading of anything ever). With typescript types being dynamically computed based on the queries. It has its own pitfalls as well (like no types when using raw queries).

Yokohiii10mo ago· 1 in thread

The way you describe it, it would be ideal if ORMs would only handle very basic CRUD and force you to use raw sql for complex queries. But that's not reality and not how they are used, not always. In my opinion some devs take pride to do everything with their favorite ORM.

I think if an app uses 90% ORM code with the remains as raw queries, a junior is inclined to favor ORM code and is also less exposed to actually writing SQL. He is unlikely to become an SQL expert, but using SQL behind a code facade, he should become one.

mattmanserOP10mo ago

And the ORM free code has massive downsides, not limited to if you add/change a column code can break at runtime, not compile time.

The negatives of not using an ORM is far worse than the negatives of not reigning in some developers who shouldn't be making complex queries.

If they don't even know how to check the SQL their complex ORM query produces, that's a training problem, not an ORM problem.

It's one of our great weaknesses as a profession, assuming everyone will figure stuff out on their own.

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