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I've written/worked on several ORMs from scratch. ORMs are the industry standard. When I see posts like this I simply can't take them seriously. All they are saying is "I won't be a team player" and "I don't actually understand the subject matter". The reality is at a certain scale there's an entire orm team that optimizes everything. But even when there's no team involved there's no way you can write anything more optimized because I'm already at the computational limit of how far something can be optimized.

There's no (good) ORM that doesn't let you simply put your own query in.

by swasheck1 hours ago|

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I don’t understand this comment because in no way did I express that I’m not the team player. Seems like this is something of a sacred cow for you. Or maybe it’s a language barrier thing, but all I was trying to do was say that as a member of the data platform team, when I recommend handwritten SQL to address specific limitations of an orm, that is the response that I got. Hope this helps.

by hparadiz1 hours ago|

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My reply was talking in general terms about the original post.

You wrote the exact opposite of my opinion here which is why I replied to your specifically:

> People who love and advocate the merits of ORM insist that everything be executed through ORM because it introduces too much complexity for them to blend handwritten SQL with the ORM generated queries

I believe strongly that good ORMs expose the ability to put your own queries in. But I can't possibly boil down all the reasons for this in one HN comment.

An ORM is not a query writer. It's a way to map SQL primitives to run time primitives in a static deterministic way backed by a suite of unit tests.

If you have a special query you wanna run that has 10 joins, 2 sub queries, and a derived view that's totally fine. No one says you can't. However remember that statistically 99.9% of all queries are not that.

by toast02 hours ago|

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> All they are saying is "I won't be a team player" and "I don't actually understand the subject matter".

I get the first part, but not the second.

Preferring to use SQL rather than an ORM + SQL is all about understanding the subject matter, which is the data as it exists in the database.

> The tldr is if you're ever concatenating strings in order to build a query you're just doing what the entire job of orm is but rolling your own and chances are you'll end up with a bunch of bugs in how you handle well.... Everything.

Yeah, so basically don't do this, except when you have to, like concatenating placeholders for a variable size IN query.

There's some classes of applications where it's hard to write all the queries because there's all sorts of mix and match stuff happening. Those are pretty much doomed to poor performance if the tables are large, so I would rather not play on those teams. On the bright side, the limit of a small table gets bigger every ram generation, and table scans on nvme aren't so painful either.

by hparadiz1 hours ago|

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We're pointing out the same thing. Someone that uses an ORM knows when they shouldn't use them and I tend to trust that more than someone who simply refuses to use them and ends up recreating an ORM by accident.

by toast01 hours ago|

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> Someone that uses an ORM knows when they shouldn't use them

That's not been my experience. But admittedly, I've usually been brought in when the slow query is killing the database. Then I look at the query that nobody with any subject matter knowledge would have written, come up with an alternate query that will give either the same result or something close enough. Sometimes I have to then dig in and figure out how to make that happen, because the ORM user doesn't always know how to make direct queries.

But it sure did make the easy things easier, as the other poster said.

by hparadiz1 hours ago|

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People focus on the query writing aspect of ORMs too much. That's not that primary reason you use an ORM. It's primary purpose is to hydrate objects in the runtime. If I pull a datetime from SQL there's a lot of value in having a single piece of code handle that datetime the same way across the entire stack. I can unit test that handling once across the entire code base. Very few ORMs are aware of how the data is indexed and yes a lot of people will write code that generates a complex WHERE clause against columns that aren't indexed. But that's an understanding problem. I expect someone who uses an ORM to understand SQL well. Including indexes and fixed length tables. Obviously you are encountering code made by people who don't understand this but the problem isn't the ORM. They would have made that mistake with or without an ORM.

by toast01 hours ago|

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> I expect someone who uses an ORM to understand SQL well.

From experience, I don't. ORMs are usually sold as 'learn this instead of learning SQL'. For many, the ORM creates the tables, alters the tables, and queries the tables; they don't see SQL and they don't know SQL. When that works, it works, but when it falls apart, they have to debug the SQL and the abstraction layer. I'd rather have fewer unnecessary abstraction layers.

> If I pull a datetime from SQL there's a lot of value in having a single piece of code handle that datetime the same way across the entire stack.

There's value there, datetimes are very complex, but the rest of the stuff it comes with obscures the value IMHO.

> Obviously you are encountering code made by people who don't understand this but the problem isn't the ORM. They would have made that mistake with or without an ORM.

It's hard to write the kind of complex queries I've seen by hand, and I like to imagine if you out how to do that, you'll also know why it's slow and not need my help... But the ORM is part of the problem, because when you've written bad queries by hand, and I give you a better query (or sequence of queries), it's easy to apply. When you've done it with an ORM, you may not even know where the query is made.

by hatefulheart3 hours ago|

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What optimizations are you making here when at the end of the day performance is dictated by the schema, the query planner and the network?

by bot4033 hours ago|

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I read it as "I've optimized the orm to be minimal overhead over raw sql a lot of the time".

by hparadiz2 hours ago|

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I've actually benchmarked the overhead for my ORM against every major PHP orm that exists.

https://the-php-bench.technex.us/runs/1

But the speed is irrelevant as long as it's good enough. Notice Laravel's Eloquent at the bottom of the list yet thousands of projects are being built with it regularly.

by hparadiz3 hours ago|

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How can I possibly condense 24 years of deep knowledge in one comment for you?

The tldr is if you're ever concatenating strings in order to build a query you're just doing what the entire job of orm is but rolling your own and chances are you'll end up with a bunch of bugs in how you handle well.... Everything.

by hatefulheart3 hours ago|

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I think your tone is a bit combative. You can certainly provide the cliff notes but if you want me to believe you’re at working at computational limits whilst talking to me about string concatenation in web dev backend languages I think the burden of proof is on you.

by 7bit2 hours ago|

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I don't think OP ever expected you to believe anything. He stated his experience and nothing more

by hatefulheart2 hours ago|

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Oh it was just a flex?

Ok then!

by swasheck1 hours ago|

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the amount of vitriol my comment generated was unexpected. i was sharing that my experience was the opposite of the comment I was replying to. So many people have read things into it that simply do not make sense to me, including this one. It wasn’t a flex, it was a statement of experience that was simply a different experience than the post I was replying to asserted as truth. As a senior member of the data team, I interact with developer teams regularly and suggest manual handwritten sql for particular performance edge cases, and I met with the response I mentioned. It’s not me not being the team player, it’s the development team using the ORM that has decided that the level of effort to maintain handwritten and ORM sequel is too much for their team to handle

by talon863541 minutes ago|

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Believe what you want, but I would consider myself one of those allegedly mythical people

by stephen3 hours ago|

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Fair point, both "pro ORM" and "anti ORM" camps are prone to extreme stances.

I definitely don't agree with the "all queries must be executed through the ORM", and think that dogmatic stance has done a lot of damage to the ORM brand. :-/

by HelloNurse3 hours ago|

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They don't consider the ORM the second class citizen it actually is: an optional simplified alternative to normal queries, that can be used for the easy cases.