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Comment by 3riverdev | Hacker News Reader

(Bias: I'm one of the Hibernate ORM committers.)

Hibernate (and presumably any ORM) was never intended to be a complete abstraction of anything-SQL. Like others have mentioned here, an understanding of SQL must be had before using an ORM. The ORM is one piece to the puzzle, not a shield to prevent you from having to touch SQL.

One pattern I typically use is a take on CQRS: Hibernate for writing/updating/fetching/deleting a single instance of deeply-relational object model, SQL (I like jOOQ) for larger-scale fetches and any bulk actions.

Shameless plug for a write-up I put together last year: https://www.3riverdev.com/hibernate-orm-jooq-hikaricp-transa...

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I must admit that I've inherited two messes where someone used NHibernate as a replacement for SQL. In both cases, the schema was excruciatingly simple but the code performed excruciatingly poorly.

In once case the project was canceled, in part because it was so late due to the developers not knowing how to use a database. In the other case I put my foot down and removed NHibernate. The schema was so simple that it was just easier to put a few extra minutes into boilerplate code than to put time into learning a new thing.

I'd really like to see a good writeup about the use cases that tools like Hibernate excel at. The problem is that, in both cases, I had to work with a high-level manager who had very bad assumptions about what Hibernate can and can't do.

I'm so glad someone finally confirms my idea about using hibernate. I've been in constant battle with developers that map full object graphs coming Frome some endpoint to hibernate/jpa annotated classes and then throw it at hibernate. Here you save this... It just doesn't work that way very well. It's always a mess with relationships. Whereas you run your logic on entities attached to the session things work out nicely.

> Hibernate (and presumably any ORM) was never intended to be a complete abstraction of anything-SQL. Like others have mentioned here, an understanding of SQL must be had before using an ORM.

Disagree. You need to understand the relational model, but you don't need to understand SQL-the-language. I've written plenty of successful systems using hibernate without needing to touch SQL, and am much happier for it.

I agree with you, but I think people (for better or worse) are using the two terms interchangeably in this thread.

I have my own views on this but I basically agree with everything you said.

I think ORM is a great way to translate tables into real objects that have their own methods and properties that may or may not interact with the DB. I think that's where the real power is.

But for performance-necessary actions, yeah, SQL all the way (or rather a query builder).

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