I don't understand why all these problems should be easier handled with an ORM then with raw sql?
Before you tell me about how you just use a Query Builder/DSL and a object mapper for convenience: That's a freaking ORM!
With SQL you need to explicitly test all queries where the shape granularity is down to field level.
When you map data onto an object model (in the dto sense, not oop sense) you have bigger building blocks.
This gives a simpler application that is more reliable.
Obviously you need to pick a performant orm - and it seems a lot of people in these threads have been traumatized.
Personally, I run a complex application where developers freely use a graphql schema and requests are below 50ms p99 - gql in translated into joins by the orm, so we do not have any n+1 issues, etc.
I've most often seen this countered through data loaders (batched queries that are merged in code) instead of joins, or query whitelists.
The key is to hold the same schema on the database as on the graphql and use tooling that can translate a gql query into a single query.
But indices does not need to yield a single result. It is OK that indices reduce the result set to tens or couple of hundreds of result. That is well within the performance requirements (... of our app)
As you've mentioned graphql you probably comparing ORM in that sense to an traditional custom API with backed by raw sql. In a fair comparison both version would do the exactly same, require the same essential tests. Assuming more variations for the raw sql version is just assuming it does more or somehow does it badly in terms of architecture. Which is not a fair comparison.
An example is prisma. Prisma has a team og engineers that work on optimizing query generation and provide a simple and intuitive api.
Not using an orm forces you to take over that organization and test that extra complexity that goes into you code base.
It might be merited if you get substantiel performance boosts - but I have not seen any reasonably modern orm where performance is the issue.
You know, it should. There's no good reason for an ORM to ever fail at runtime due to mapping problems instead of compile time or start time. (Except, of course if you change it during the software's execution.)
You realize that’s abysmally bad performance for any reasonable OLTP query, right? Sub-msec (as measured by the DB, not including RTT etc.) is very achievable, even at scale. 2-3 msec for complex queries.