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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, ORMs insulate you from database integrity since ORMs have limited access to underlying database features.

In Postgres that usually means you're not locking rows, you're not using upsert, you might not be writing table DDL yourself. It often means you aren't even using database transactions.

While these things might be extraneous fluff for an all-nighter hackathon, you really have to figure out a sweet spot so that data integrity violations aren't killing your velocity when your service's rubber begins hitting the road.

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These are important features for a database toolkit to consider. I don't think that it is fair to dismiss an entire category of libraries on the grounds of some implementations being less complete than desired though. If we applied that same standard more generally, then we wouldn't use anything at all, because most software libraries kind of stink.

Fair enough. Do you have a favorite ORM that makes what you feel is a decent set of trade-offs, all things considered?

Admittedly, most of my experience with ORMs was with Ruby on Rails' Active Record + Rails' generated SQL tables + the culture that ensued from it, like large production Rails applications that didn't use a single db transaction (and often no indexes). Though I reckon things could have changed in 15 years.

I can imagine that an ORM might be the best option for most people. It wasn't until I worked at one specific company that I learned how to really use Postgres. Before that, an ORM and its abstractions probably made more sense than expecting me to figure out how to use a database directly on my own.

I've been building one for Go in my free time, but it's not ready for general use. Historically, I've used Django despite being imperfect, because I can just install Wagtail and have a nice admin interface for free. It does have some nice convenience features though and transactions are easy enough. At my day job we use a Java framework with a terrible codegen-based ORM. Laravel has a decent database toolkit if you are into PHP. Unfortunately, excellent database toolkits are rare, and I have historically found myself dipping into SQL frequently. All decent ones will at least allow you to do so though.

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