Comment by Quarrelsome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Quarrelsome | Hacker News Reader

Religion and engineering do not make good bedfellows. I got into a pointless argument with someone on LinkedIn who was trashing on ORMs, strawmanning them by stating they would all pull the entire data into memory to just perform a count (some ORMs are much more sophisticated than this). It was some sort of weird religious argument because the chap thought every single piece of data processing should be written in a stored procedure (much like your first example).

However the flip side of the coin in your case is somehow even worse, because people failed to identify the good in the RDBMS and only identified it all with evil, despite then storing their blobs in an RDBMS.

To me, the use of distributed transactions is the smell. If your solution to the problem of a multi-database model is a sticking plaster that can generate even worse problems (e.g. the deadlocks) then it just shows a poor approach to problem solving or allocating enough resource to development.

I work for a company that's still obsessed with micro services. "Religious" is a pretty good way to describe it. Drives me absolutely nuts, especially when no one seems to understand what micro services are. I've seen at least half a dozen teams that have just created a distributed monolith and called it a micro service because they're using Docker and Kubernetes.

ORMs are basically the enemy of rdbms, by encouraging antipatterns and undermining language features they have easily done more harm than good. of course reasonable people can be trusted to use them reasonably but if you're arguing about it on the internet..

ye I think the guy I was arguing with was mostly a DBA so I get his perspective, but its just religious to be wholly on one or the other side of the argument.

Even as someone who is a DBA I say ORMs are great for most simple queries.

Haha. I’ve actually had an ORM attempt to load the whole database just to do a count. That was a fun bug to dig into (nobody noticed until we had a big enough customer) and an easy fix. Literally, all I had to do was mark some fields as lazy loaded.

I think the problem is that it's not very obvious to developers that one or the other thing is going wrong until - as you say - you get a big enough customer.

I'm not hugely experimented, and SQL has always been enough for me, perhaps due to my simple requirements. But so far I hold the opinion that ORM is always a mistake.

I find a lot of programmers don't know how to write an array of floats to disk, if you forced me to choose between an ORM or No DB at all, I would choose no DB all day.

ORM feels like an abstraction on top of an abstraction. I don't trust that those who chose ORMs have studied and exhausted the possibilities of the two underlying layers, I feel more often than not they recourse to higher layers of technology without understanding the lower level.

But I may be wrong, maybe those who use ORMs know all about File systems and Posix and SQL itself.

It also reminds me of the people who ask chatgpt to write a prompt for them, it's as if you had a dishwasher and you were too lazy to load the dishes onto the dishwasher, so you buy a product that loads the dishes to the dishwasher.

> I find a lot of programmers don't know how to write an array of floats to disk

what does that have to do with it?

I think his point is that ORMs (and maybe DBs in general) are used for data persistence by folks who just don’t know any alternative.

Yes that is my contention.

This Simpson's clip summarizes it in a more poetic style

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BT7_owW2sU

I've seen a common problem for auto-didacts is that, since the advanced and modern concepts outnumber the fundamentals, they often find themselves learning advanced concepts before the basics.

This is especially common in programming with stackoverflow or AIs where the devs look for the quickest and easiest to use solution, pushing the code and complexity beneath the rug under the dependency layer, so that their implementing code looks nice and clean.

It's hard to figure out as a begginer that the simplest and most basic solution are 10 lines of POSIX function calls, instead of three lines of "import solution" "setup solution" "use solution".

> ORM feels like an abstraction on top of an abstraction. I don't trust that those who chose ORMs have studied and exhausted the possibilities of the two underlying layers, I feel more often than not they recourse to higher layers of technology without understanding the lower level.

I agree with that. However I feel that teams that choose not to use an ORM end up having one somehow reimplemeted by the seniors, and just used as you describe by the juniors.

I'd rather have the seniors master an existing ORM and spend their time elsewhere.

Surely it would be an ORM designed specifically for the business domain, instead of a generic ORM.

I know both and ORMs are fine. They save a lot of time at the cost of some inefficiency. However some of the newer ones are like Entity Framework Core for dotnet are significantly smarter than older models.

Is that time saved initially but paid later as tech debt? Or time saved on the long run?

often the debt is fine and doesn't need to be paid back. Its only tech debt when its a hotspot. For example all the ORM code that handles admin functions that the vast majority of the user base don't use.

Yeah, I've had almost the same experience with people and ORMs. Often they'll make a good point about some weakness of some specific ORM, but it is almost always some use case that represents 1% (or less) of their application. Worse, there's nothing stopping them from just using sql for those couple of times that they need to bypass the ORM. After all, there's no reason to be religious about it and only use one tool.

99% of the time, I see ORMs pulling every single field for every query.

One of the things I appreciate about GraphQL is that it doesn’t even offer a way to ‘SELECT *’

Most teams that “use raw SQL” end up accidentally writing ORMs anyway. You have a bunch of similar SQL queries so someone writes a SQL generator. Someone notices that if we are using one field from the account table, then we usually want the others, so they create an Account object and share it to reduce duplication.

You’re usually better off starting with a good standard ORM at the beginning.

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