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I think it's just a contrived example. They probably wanted to show more than a single thing composing in a very short post given it's from their Toilet series.

Replace it with `getUsers(filters)` or even a specialised function, and it starts making more sense.

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It's exactly this - I do regret using "db" a bit now after reading all of the comments here, as it's taken away focus from the main point. But yes, the post had to fit on a single page, and I needed to pick something that most engineers would be familiar with.

Kinda hints most people haven't used a good ORM, or if they have maybe just don't understand how it really works. Django looks similar to this and would have the same misunderstanding (User.objects.all()), except it actually returns a QuerySet object that would let getExpiredUsers() apply its own criteria and not actually run the query until something tries to read from the object. There's an example up above where someone shows SQLAlchemy doing the same thing.

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