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Comment by eftpotrm | Hacker News Reader

Personally, in developing quite a lot of different data-backed apps, I've never really found the problem ORMs are solving to be a hugely significant one; it seems like a 'quick fix' for coders who don't really understand SQL anyway, which always felt to me to be attacking the problem in the wrong place. SQL isn't that hard....

In any case, while I don't dispute that it might offer speed of startup advantages for some developers, it seems no-one is so far disputing that it simply doesn't scale and, if your project really takes off, it will be creating problems. Call me a fogey if you will but I don't like the idea of launching a project that I know will need very substantial rearchitecting too early in its life.

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It's hard to believe this isn't just trolling.

Writing a large app directly using SQL is not "hard," but A) it's exceptionally boring, B)it necessitates mental context shifting from your app language to SQL, and C) it requires you to think about nuts and bolts routine below-your-paygrade solved concerns like SQL injection, transaction management, type casting, etc.

Two more points:

I've never seen a large app that either didn't use a popular ORM or didn't end up REINVENTING large chunks of functionality ORMs provide. Good developers write DRY code, and SQL everywhere leads to, eventually, some library that looks remarkably like... an ORM...

Finally, in the case of large web applications (since that's HN's bread and butter), an ORM'd app will not need a "very substantial rearchitecting" to get rid of the ORM. That statement is patently absurd. Early in its life, for scaling (always, IF it becomes necessary) what it will need is dropping down to SQL to tune some aspects of some pages. Architect for doomsday if you like (or, conversely, if you need extra hours to bill) -- or architect to ship.

There are libraries out there that already reinvent the large chunks of functionality ORMs provide without requiring you to use an actual ORM. I think the middle ground is the best way to go here. Avoid ORMs, avoid native SQL, meet somewhere in the middle.

Like what?

Perl has Fey. http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Fey

As ORMs go Fey::ORM (built on top of Fey) is good. It's easy to get under the hood and make it do exactly what you want. http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Fey::ORM::Manual::Intro

A) it's exceptionally boring

Perhaps as a result of it being so exceptionally boring that it's so error-prone. If you forget to wire something up by hand (especially if its nullable) and don't notice while you're coding, it can be one of those subtle little bugs that lingers in the background until it really bites you.

Also, you forgot:

D) Difficult and time-consuming to create test automation for.

Yes! At least LINQ-to-SQL gives compile time type checking.

Linq 2 SQL has ambiguous relationship path decision function when deciding how to map the Linq expression tree model to the SQL DBMS's model.

Compile-time type checking is very illusory with heterogeneous execution, not only for this reason but also because it is a distributed application and the schema can change.

And I've been bitten by the truth of your statement. It sure beats the pants off writing SQL by hand.

Is LINQ even in favor anymore. I think we're all about the entity framework now which appears to be more or less ORM with an auto update component for references to the orm objects.

No, but you still use LINQ style lambda expressions to do more advanced queries involving the EF objects. It's actually a really, really nice blend. If you're doing .NET dev though, take a look at NHibernate. It's been around longer, it's been stable much longer, it has more features... and it actually has a community which is probably EF's weakest point IMO.

I'm old and set in my ways at the ripe-age of 29 and like my sql processed as prepared statements that reside in my data objects. I also curse everytime I see relationships between data that do not boil down to int (size of system's cpu architecture) equivalency checks.

Good developers write DRY code, and SQL everywhere leads to, eventually, some library that looks remarkably like... an ORM...

I agree with this.

I think you can look at this two ways, over time you incur technical debt for a variety of reasons (if your app is being used or growing in any way). The articles author thinks it is best to start at the bottom and build up your "model layer" from scratch.

People who use an ORM start from above and almost certainly will have to modify their entire software stack to address things like scaling and unusual features along the way. As long as you know your ORM well and can do the rearcitecting this really is not a problem.

Basically whichever approach you take a good developer would end up with the app in roughly the same state.

Personally I would prefer to start with an ORM and work down, just because it is a hell of lot quicker.

You've never seen a large app that didn't use ORM? What about every large business application from the late 70s-early 2000s?

A) I'm not sure why its execeptionally boring. Solving problems with sql is interesting and elegant in it's own way (like using recursion or functional programming to create an new algorithm).

Lots of people posting who don't know so much about the specifics of the database the are using. Why spend thousands on Oracle or SqlServer then abstract all those features out?

Phil

I'm definitely an old-school code-sql-by-hand guy and I used an ORM (Entity Framework 4.0 Code-First) for the first time for my startup project, a data-intensive online strategy game.

I've found that for many things, it's so much faster in terms of dev time, especially with the super-cool code-first approach, to get things out there and working using the ORM. I can create a new fully-functioning and reliably-working repository class, along with its test double, in around a minute. Really.

Of course, I have found that I've had to replace bits of it with hand-coded SQL for performance reasons. But I've decided to stick this general approach for now because I don't need to substantially rearchitect everything, I can just replace the very few bits that have proven to be an actual performance bottleneck, and keep the development speed for the many places where runtime speed just doesn't matter as much.

I don't mean to start an argument over which ORM you want to go with, but you might want to give this a look, if you're interested in being able to quickly iterate on a data model and still have test coverage: http://wiki.fluentnhibernate.org/Persistence_specification_t....

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

No problem. Do you have any info about your startup? I have been working on a similar idea as a back-burner thing for years but I'm in the process of doing a different startup, so I think it'll stay there.

http://victorsunited.com

It's a turn-based, (largely) asynchronous, strategic conquest game that uses the same ruleset as a classic board game that you probably played when you were a kid.

The idea is to create a social game that you're not embarrassed to play. You know the trend of people getting together in bars to play Settlers of Catan for hours on Friday nights? We're trying to make a game that same people would want to play for a few minutes at a time from their office on Monday morning.

I've got a half-written article about how we're doing some cool continuous deployment stuff that I plan on sharing with HN soon. In the meantime, any and all feedback is welcome.

Looking forward to the continuous deployment article.

I was interested in your game, I played Galaxy PBEM some time ago, but you have few flaws: 1. You assume that everybody played board game, which I haven't, so you don't have an easy introduction for a new player. 2. You have single player game, but you set up a high barrier to try it, I don't understand why you need logging in when a cookie will be enough.

Thanks for the feedback.

1. We do have a pretty straightforward tutorial. Http://victorsunited.com/help/tutorial

2. We are working on a way to bypass the login/registration requirement for single player games. To be honest, the Singleplayer mode was something of an afterthought, and the SP experience isn't yet as polished as it should be.

The problem with writing all your SQL "by hand" is that it's needless code duplication.

Set aside databases for a moment. Let's say that instead we're going to generate a bunch of different types of documents, all in the same output format (PostScript or LaTeX or HTML or whatever). Which approach would you take to this problem?

A) For each type of document, manually write out the necessary code from scratch, starting over again each time, or

B) Write some general-purpose libraries which understand the output format and expose an API that you can call programmatically to generate the documents?

I don't think anyone would choose (A) in this case. But many people do choose, and pride themselves on choosing it, as soon as we change from any other use case to generating database queries. Why do we suddenly have to throw away everything we know about writing libraries and avoiding duplication, just to pretend that typing out some SQL makes us "real programmers"?

ORM, in essence, is nothing more than this: a convenient API you can call to do database queries. Why should it be so different?

shocking vote up

It's not that SQL is hard, it's that it becomes very redundant very quickly.

That being said, I use ORMs all the time, but have never really been a massive fan. There's always going to be a little bit of mismatch because object != relational.

I find myself attracted to document databases simply because it feels like there's less of a disconnect between objects and documents.

I do remember an ORM called iBATIS that wasn't too bad though. It actually made my classes look cleaner and didn't treat SQL like a red headed stepchild.

These days, working with ARel doesn't make me feel too dirty.

I have worked with ORMs and with raw SQL. In my personal experience, using raw SQL exclusively becomes time consuming when you need to make the jump between the raw sql results and objects.

With a well designed ORM, it should be possible to have the best of both worlds. One of the features that I value in Django's builtin ORM is the ability to almost seamlessly drop down to raw SQL when needed:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/

"using raw SQL exclusively becomes time consuming when you need to make the jump between the raw sql results and objects"

I don't find that to be true. You write the SQL, you've already written your Objects, you write a 2-3 line row -> object(s) mapper (supported by your own utils, or something like Spring). You have clear control and mapping between SQL and Object.

This said, I like what I've seen and used of the Django ORM so far, but then my application has not been anywhere close to as complex as the "day job" RDBMS.

If you have entity with 10 fields and 5 nested collections (which may also have more nested objects) and you need load full object for edit (and save it after), it will be more than '2-3 line'

I don't know how I could manage deployments as effectively as I do today without Migrations.

And i don't know how I could ever write DB functions more clever than, say, the ones DataMapper gives me.

And I don't know how anybody could prefer

"Select * from TableOne Inner Join TableTwo using(SomeCol) Inner Join TableThree using(OtherCol) where TableOne.foo = ? and TableOne.bar = ?"

to, say, ORMs at their best:

result = TableOne.findByFooAndBar("foo", "bar");

> result = TableOne.findByFooAndBar("foo", "bar");

This doesn't give me the same information as the SQL. This, for example, doesn't tell me it's doing an Inner Join on two tables. Being that I know the query you are replicating here, I can assume either it's automatically joining all tables that are related to the table I'm calling. In which case, how do I get a result while only joining specific tables (or none), or the more likely case, it's not doing any join, and waiting until I actually call the object, whereby it performs the query on the table.

Simply put, the SQL query tells me exactly what is being called. The ORM does not, and hides away what it's doing. Granted, this is your example, but it's also easy to find this same style in ORMs in the wild.

I'm on the bench about ORMs myself. I use one, and enjoy it's use. However, it's also annoying because I'm comfortable with SQL and can whip up a query faster than I can wrestle the ORM to do what I want.

It's about convention over configuration.

Learn a few conventions (not hard) and there you go. In some ORM's, the magic findByX functions will do no joins -- in others it will do all joins. And learning which is quite easy.

And almost universarlly, the findByFooAndBar type magic methods are not the most commonly used feature because often you need complex conditionals (let alone complex joins). But when you do need just a quick record, it's wonderfully easy.

You can get cozy with an ORM in an afternoon. After that, you've got nothing ahead of you but timesaves. Sure, sometimes the ORM abstraction will break or you'll find yourself fighting it. So at that point you use the ORMs connection manager to execute some raw SQL and be on your way.

Your argument, to me sounds as wrong as if you said "I don't like MVC frameworks. Without a frameowork, I know that when I go to www.example.com/path/to/index.php I know exactly what is being called.

But in an MVC, www.example.com/path/to could be anything! The routing engine and framework hides away what it's doing.

But I use it because it's not really as opaque as you portray, and it saves me SO. MUCH. TIME.

And once you learn convention, the ORM makes it EASIER to grok any codebase that uses it than it would if they used straight SQL.

Anyway, as always, YMMV and I respect your fence-riding. I've used some unfortunate ORM's before (CakePHP I'm looking at you! Adopt Doctrine!) where instead of writing a simple query I'm stuck crafting some insane nested dictionary structure.

Do you recommend any particular good (free preferably) ORMs to practice with? Never used one before in my day to day job :(

Really I'd find the best one for whatever language you're strongest with.

My absolute favorite, bar none, is Ruby's DataMapper.

In PHP, the best ORM project is certainly Doctrine. Doctrine can be a little overwhelming at first, but it's worth it. However if you found yourself just not pursuing it because of its complexity, I've found that the Kohana framework has a quaint, easy to use ORM. Not a bad start.

In Python, SQLAlchemy is great.

In .Net obviously LINQ.

.NET also has NHibernate. I'm not intimately familiar with the pros/cons of LINQ to SQL vs NHibernate, but I believe it gives you a lot more control over things like pre-loading associations, etc (while requiring a lot more configuration).

One con of LINQ to SQL is that it only supports MS's DBs. LINQ to Entities is the more flexible version. Though you have to go whole hog and use Entity Framework. There is also a active record implementation for .NET called castle active record.

> One con of LINQ to SQL is that it only supports MS's DBs.

This is not true for Entity Framework (which is essentially the newest iteration of Linq2Sql.) I have successfully used EF with SQLite in production, and it appears to have a MySQL driver as well (I honestly don't know how well the MySQL driver works.)

That is what I meant by LINQ to Entities, which is what I thought they were calling the new version. There are plenty of DB drivers(I think they call them providers) for EF.

I've been using datamapper recently - I like it, but would be interested to hear what makes you like it so much over the others (which I haven't used, except for a smattering of ActiveRecord).

> In .Net obviously LINQ.

LINQ is not an ORM. There is LINQ to Objects and LINQ to XML, which query collections and XML documents respectively.

The first ORM over Linq from Microsoft was Linq to SQL. This is now deprecated, and the second one is called Entity Framework (EF), which was a more ambitious but slower-moving project. In the latest release, EF 4.1, it's actually quite good.

NHibernate is still very popular, in part because over the confusion over Linq to SQL and EF, in part becuase it was there first and is very mature.

There are a whole lot of other, less-well-known .Net ORMS - SubSonic, SimpleData ... just google ".net orm". But for new work, most people would only consider EF and NHibernate.

There's even a Linq to NHibernate:http://ayende.com/blog/4083/nhibernate-linq-1-0-released

That and fluent NHibernate take some of the pain out of configuring NHibernate.

I'm a Doctrine user as well, and I've been using it for years now. But I still stand by what I said. Mostly it's a result of finding that regardless of the ORM being used, knowing SQL is still required for anything serious (or, not knowing SQL can hurt).

I was forced to port an existing in-house web app from Postgres to Oracle. Thanks to ActiveRecord I just made some tweaks to the db config file and didn't have to touch a line of code. Of course, it's not always this easy but a good ORM can buy you a lot of portability.

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