Comment by sgk284 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgk284 | Hacker News Reader

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What a weird statement. In many ways, SQL is a higher-level abstraction than an ORM. A better analogy might be functional versus imperative styles, but even that breaks down pretty quickly.

ORMs generally serve some subset of three purposes: 1) constrain the dynamic nature and expressiveness of SQL in such a way that it can work well in less expressive languages 2) serve as a bridge between a typed language and an untyped language and 3) a way to avoid your team needing to learn and work in two languages for backend dev (similar to arguments of using Node so that your frontend and backend can be the same language).

To claim one is superior to the other without context is just a very inexperienced statement to make. I'd highly encourage any team that is comfortable being a polyglot to consider avoiding ORMs and embracing the DB as much as possible.

> 3) a way to avoid your team needing to learn and work in two languages for backend dev (similar to arguments of using Node so that your frontend and backend can be the same language)

It's not about learning or working in multiple languages, it's about duplicating the specification of important details.

The holy grail would allow me to write critical business rules in one place, then make use of them everywhere. I want to only have to specify once that `email` is required on `contact`, and have that manifest as `NOT NULL` on the database, an API validation, and a little star next to the field on the UI. Unfortunately, there doesn't yet seem to be a solution to that problem.

Well, there is the option of writing all your CRUD methods as stored procedures which are the things that actually create/update records (while still allowing complex reporting queries), but that means writing all that logic in the provided SQL language.

That was one of the most interesting things to me about the Drizzle MySQL fork project. One of the goals was to make the SQL language that was used a plugin, so you could use just about whatever you want, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, Haskell, whatever, as the SQL server level. Being able to share client and server level code opens up some interesting possibilities. Alas, I think it ended up being abandoned.

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