Re:What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
by kerkeslager on Monday June 27, 2016 @12:03AM
(#11984156)
I suspect you're viewing my previous comment as a criticism of ORMs. I tried to make it clear that it was not a criticism of ORMs. It's more a criticism of people who try use ORMs to whitewash a bad design or get around a problem that relational databases can't solve. Relational databases lend themselves to a very specific way of structuring data, and if you don't structure your data that way or your data can't be structured that way, an ORM won't fix it. That doesn't mean ORMs are bad, it means that ORMs have to be used as intended and often people don't use them as intended. That's not the fault of the ORM any more than it's the fault of a screwdriver when it's used to saw wood.
Re:What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
by ourmandave on Monday June 27, 2016 @08:16AM
(#11985645)
Nobody uses a screwdriver to saw wood. But they're great as replacement paint stirrers and hole punches.
That's my bad ORM misuse analogy.
As a maintenance programmer, it really fries my bacon when I find all the screwdrivers next to the old paint cans.
Why? You're just making that assumption but the fact is that relational databases and the normalized storage of data is completely different from the way OO languages deal with rich nested objects. And there's nothing wrong with that mismatch because there will always be a mismatch. It's just 2 different paradigms of handling data. All an ORM is doing is giving you a tool to make that translation easier, if you want it. If you really can't have the mismatch then there are document-stores available but in most cases, the O/R mapping is just not a big deal.
> But I think a lot of those benefits can be realized with a simple wrapper around SQL (i.e. LINQ).
That's basically still an ORM. Again why the assumption that just because you have an ORM that anything and everything must be piped through it? The modern ones let you use ORM methods in your code and chain them with custom raw SQL too. ORM usage is on a spectrum, it's not binary and there's definitely no "right" way to use them.