this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
147 points (93.5% liked)

Programming

17373 readers
158 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Some backend libraries let you write SQL queries as they are and deliver them to the database. They still handle making the connection, pooling, etc.

ORMs introduce a different API for making SQL queries, with the aim to make it easier. But I find them always subpar to SQL, and often times they miss advanced features (and sometimes not even those advanced).

It also means every time I use a ORM, I have to learn this ORM's API.

SQL is already a high level language abstracting inner workings of the database. So I find the promise of ease of use not to beat SQL. And I don't like abstracting an already high level abstraction.

Alright, I admit, there are a few advantages:

  • if I don't know SQL and don't plan on learning it, it is easier to learn a ORM
  • if I want better out of the box syntax highlighting (as SQL queries may be interpreted as pure strings)
  • if I want to use structures similar to my programming language (classes, functions, etc).

But ultimately I find these benefits far outweighed by the benefits of pure sql.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (11 children)

You miss the major reason of an orm, abstract vendor specif syntax, i.e. dialect and derived languages such as pl sql, t-sql, etc.

Orm are supposed to allow you to be vendor agnostic

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm always curious about this particular feature/argument. From the aspect of "i can unit test easier because the interface is abstracted, so I can test with no database." Great. (though there would be a debate on time saved with tests versus live production efficiency lost on badly formed automatic SQL code)

For anything else, I have to wonder how often applications have actual back-end technologies change to that degree. "How many times in your career did you actually replace MSSQL with Oracle?" Because in 30 years of professional coding for me, it has been never. If you have that big of a change, you are probably changing the core language/version and OS being hosted on, so everything changes.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

If you are building software where the customer is the deployer being flexible on what database can be used is a pretty big step. Without it could turn off potential customers that have already existing infastructure.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Some of us have had to support multiple database targets. So I don't know about changing a database in a running application, but a good abstraction has made it easier to extend support and add clients when we could quickly and easily add new database providerz

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Well, developing on SQLite and deploying to Postgres is a much more common scenario than migrating your data from one DBMS to another.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Working in a data intensive context, I saw such migrations very often, from and to oracle, ms sql, postgres, sas, exasol, hadoop, parquet, Kafka. Abstraction, even further than orms, is extremely helpful.

Unfortunately in most real case scenarios companies don't value abstraction, because it takes time that cannot be justified in PI plannings and reviews. So people write it as it is quicker, and migrations are complete re write. A lot of money, time and resources wasted to reinvent the wheel.

Truth is that who pays doesn't care, otherwise they'd do it differently. They deserve the waste of money and resources.

On the other hand, now that I think of it, I've never seen a real impacting OS migration. Max os migration I've seen is from centos or suse to rhel... In the field I work on, non unix OSes are always a bad choice anyway

load more comments (6 replies)