undefined | Better HN

0 pointsDaril1y ago0 comments

Yes, I understand your point of view, but in my experience these ORM libraries when you create a class or a structure and then the library build the SQL code behind the scenes can suffer from some relevant issues :

1. you have no control over the generated SQL and because it has to be generic and db agnostic, might not be the best option depending on the database you are currently using

2. when something doesn't work as expected, and it happens, they are difficult to debug (too many layers) and find the issue

3. they are extremely inefficient, because they have to dynamically build every time the code is run the corresponding SQL code : I'm sure most would implement some caching mechanism to prevent this , but in any case it's a waste of resources.

This is just anecdotal, but I remember trying SQLAlchemy many years ago for a small Python program I was writing for a RaspberryPi 3 : it was extremely slow. So, I removed the library and used instead the native database binding for MariaDB instead, and the speed improved a lot.

For PHP, the situation is the worst because there is no application server (they exist, but not very widely used), but the code is regenerated every time. This is the main problem in any large PHP project, such as Nextcloud. If they would adopt FrankenPHP or RoadRunner, they could improve the performance of the applications a lot.

0 comments

KronisLV1y ago

> 1. you have no control over the generated SQL

Depending on the tech in use, there's usually some sort of an escape hatch, such as writing your own native SQL queries that take advantage of the exact functionality you need, while letting you keep the 90% of the rest CRUD based on the automatically generated stuff.

Plus, nothing is preventing you from putting complex querying in a DB view and then have a read only mapping for the ORM against that, giving you the best of both worlds - using the DB for what it's good at, keeping things relatively simple and yet powerful on the app side.

movedx1y ago

I too used to believe those were valid points not to use an ORM back in the day. That was easily 2013/2014. Since then I’ve never found an ORM that gets in the way letting my just run raw SQL. And not just run raw SQL as complex as I’d like: it’ll also still give you all the magic once the response comes back.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse