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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Use the right abstraction and the right number of them: I’ve yet to find an ORM that didn’t kick you in the face In terms of performance to only hold your hand with queries.

SQL queries can be done in code in a sane way to avoid sql injection or you could implement stored procedures and functions to make operations more ORM-like but not pay any of the ORM tax.

It’s just annoying to see the DB treated so flippantly by devs who are Hussein Bolt quick in grabbing an ORM when it’s not always the right tool or even necessary. They’re great for prototyping but not for production imo

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I think HugSQL[1] (Clojure library) has really opened my eyes to what DB interaction should be like. It’s not exactly an ORM, but it protects you from SQL injection and makes it convenient to leverage the capabilities of your SQL database.

Also, his name is Usain Bolt[2].

[1] https://github.com/layerware/hugsql

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usain_Bolt

I've found Mybatis[1] to be a better alternative to Hibernate. At least with the version I was using you had to do complex mapping in XML instead of annotations which isn't great but I'll make the trade-off to avoid the ORM. Not sure if this is improved in 3.5. [1] https://github.com/mybatis/mybatis-3

Sure I am not saying crafting queries explicitly and preventing sql injection etc in code is elegant but it can be done and you can write super thin abstractions over the boring bits and still maintain a ton of power over your queries and know exactly what is going on without having to add another dependency.

The one huge win for ORMs in my mind is the standing up of and the iteration of schemas, defining a schema and then summoning a database in alembic vernacular is really neat whereas one would have to manually manage a set of init scripts and migrations oneself.

In the end there's no really clean way to do DB maintenance and work it's just work and has to be done, imo.

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