I'm not sure if you're talking about creating and altering model tables or if you mean ORMs provide safety in case underlying tables are modified. I'd argue that well-built queries should be resistant to alteration of the underlying tables, and that views and functions and stored procedures already exist to both red flag breaking changes and also to combine and reduce whatever you need without relying on third party code in another language layer to do the lifting.

Doesn't it also mean that any non-trivial migration (e.g. which requires data transformation or which needs to be structured to minimize locking) has to be defined elsewhere, thus leaving you with two different sources for migrations, plus some (ad-hoc) means to coordinate the two?

(I would say that it is conceptually perverse for a client of a system to have authority over it. Specifically, for a database client to define its schema.)

You always have to worry about your model changes if you run at any sort of scale. Some ORMs will get it right most of the time, but the few times they don’t will really bite you in the ass down the line. Especially with the more “magical” ORMs like EF where you might not necessarily know how it build your tables unless you specifically designed them yourself.

This is where migrations also become sort of annoying. Because if you use them. Then it is harder to fix the mistakes since you can’t just change your DB without using the ORM or you’ll typically break your migration stream or at least run into a lot of troubles with it.

And what is the plus side of having a code-first DB really? You can fairly easily store those “alter table” changes as you go along and have full availability of history in a very readable way that anyone, including people not using C#, Java, Python.

Which is the other issue with ORMs. If you have multiple consumers of your data. Then an ORM most likely won’t consider that as it alters your “models”.

For a lot of projects this is a non-issue, especially at first. Then 10 years down the line, it becomes a full blown nightmare and you eventually stop using the ORM. After spending a lot of resources cleaning up your technical debt.

> And what is the plus side of having a code-first DB really? You can fairly easily store those “alter table” changes as you go along and have full availability of history in a very readable way that anyone, including people not using C#, Java, Python.

The benefits should be obvious if you've used ORMs. They are an object that represents your database data in code rather than in a table where you can't touch it. If you have code that brings data from a database into code, congratulations, you've implemented part of an ORM. Having the data model defined "in code" treats the code as first-class instead of the SQL, which makes sense from an ergonomics perspective, you will spend much more time with the code objects than you will the SQL schemas. Either way, you will have two versions: a SQL version and a code version. You might as well get both from writing one.

If you can read alter table in SQL, you can probably read migrations.AddField in Python, and whatever the equivalent is in the other languages. I still am waiting with bated breath for the problems with much maligned (by some) ORMs to arrive.

The only area of development where ORMs haven’t been the cause for at least some trouble in my career has been with relatively small and completely decoupled services. Even here I’ve had to replace countless ORMs with more efficient approaches as the service eventually needed to be build with C/C++. That being said, I don’t think any of these should have been build without the ORM. The rewrite would have been almost as much of a hassle if there hadn’t been an ORM after all.

I’m not really against ORMs as such. I’m not a fan of code-first databases for anything serious, but as far as CRUD operations goes I don’t see why you wouldn’t use an ORM until it fails you, which it won’t in most cases, and in those cases where it does… well similar to what I said earlier you just wouldn’t have build it to scale from the beginning anyway, and if you had and it turned out it didn’t need to scale then you probably wasted a lot of developer resources to do so.