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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

>> Things like SQLAlchemy generate downright horrific SQL slowing everything to a crawl and causing deadlocks.

Not my experience... Would you care to explain ? SQLA works pretty well for me, as long as I stay in rather simple queries. For example, data analysis queries are next to impossible to express with SQLA, but that doesn't matter much.

For the simple update queries, it just works fine for me. It also allows for very good control on relationships, etc.

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I've always had success with ORMs when I let them write the 95% of trivial queries (SELECT * FROM table, INSERT INTO table, UPDATE table SET ... WHERE id = x). The complex queries I'd always rather write by hand to take advantage of the expressiveness of SQL, and to make sure that queries hit my indexes correctly.

I totally agree. Mr. Fowler's article lays out a good case for ORMs being a good, leaky abstraction with manholes for diving deeper when necessary. That implies that we can't, as application developers, use it as a black box, because underlying knowledge is important. Until someone comes up with a magic algebra for paving over the details SQL, we're stuck mitigating or dealing with its realities.

One of the things I've recently prioritized is the ability to run arbitrary queries (generally read-only) at some sort of REPL prompt, for debugging and investigative purposes. ORMs and their offshoots offer a great deal of support in that area because you can converse with an ORM in a domain-specific way without dropping into raw SQL. That can be a big advantage.

Maybe things have changed, I haven't used it since school and needed an example :-/

Amazing how perception works, everything you said about Hibernate and SQAlchemy is what I think about them, only switching them around. At least for the one time I had to use Hibernate, which was two years ago.

And not just because Java is an odious, ugly language, but the SQL Hibernate generates I just didn't like.

Mind you, this is with complex queries. For 90% of them, I didn't notice any difference between them, as far as generated SQL goes anyway.

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