Hacker News Reader

Comment by priyadi | Hacker News Reader

You are describing data mapper ORMs, a.k.a the good ORM. I think all the other ORM-loathing guys here had bad experiences with active record ORMs, a.k.a the bad ORM.

Also, infrastructure guys and DBA types tend not to like ORMs. But they are not the ones trying to manage the complexity in the business process. They just see our queries are not optimal, and it is everything to them.

View on HN

Right! They should really be considered two different things. I've worked a lot with Django (the bad type) which people tend to love, but I've seen the horrors that it can produce. What they seem to love about it is being able to write ridiculously complicated SQL using ridiculously complicated Python. I don't get it. These types of ORMs don't even fully map to objects. The "objects" it gives you are nothing more than database rows, so it's all at the same abstraction level as SQL, but it just looks like Python. It's crazy.

SQLAlchemy is the real deal, but it's more difficult and people prefer easy.

Oh was I enthusiastic when I first got my hands on an active record ORM: "I can use all my usual objects and it'll manage the SQL for me? Wow!". That enthusiasm reached rock bottom rather quickly as soon as I wanted to fine tune things. Turns out I'm not a fan of mutating hierarchical objects and then calling a magical .commit()-method on it, or worse: letting the ORM do it implicitly. That abstraction is just not for me and I'd rather get my hands "dirty" writing SQL, I guess.

Yes I suspect a lot of the ORM hate comes 1) from people using poorly designed ones or 2) from people working on projects that don't really require the features I mentioned. Like if you are generating reports that just issue a bunch of queries and then dump the results to the screen you probably don't care that much about the lifetime of what you've retrieved. But just because an ORM might not be the right tool for your project doesn't make it a bad tool overall, that would be like saying hammers are bad tools because they can't be used to screw in screws.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com