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by myrryr 1131 days ago
This really does remind me of that meme with the bell curve.

On the far left and right side, there is a person saying "denormalized data is great"

It is just this one in the middle which doesn't like it.

After doing pretty major projects for 40 years, let me tell you, "denormalized data is great"

It is like watching people go down the hole of "patterns for everything" and then watching them crawl back out of it again many years later.

1 comments

A provocative spin:

Left-side: ORMs suck, just write SQL

Middle: ORMs relieve the impedance mismatch of the OOP "object graph" paradigm and the SQL "relational algebra" paradigm. One could even make the argument that this mismatch is inherent and we're just doing CPR on a rotting horse -- so now the industry standard is to use NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB, to get away from bygone ways of thinking about data access. Likewise, SQL is not conducive to thorough testing coverage; and migration management is prone to user-error. In this vein, the industry has once again innovated and revolutionized data-access, moving away from "CREATE READ UPDATE DELETE" to "ENCAPSULATE INSTANTIATE INJECT CREATE READ(+UPDATE|DELETE)* TRACK PUSH SYNC." With all this in-mind, it would be utterly baroque to use anything other than JS+Node+Mongo+Mongoose for a fully unified front-end and back-end.

*An astute reader will recognize that ORMs are constantly doing N+1 queries (to first pull the data, transform it into objects, update said objects, and then push the changes to the database). We feel as though hardware has gotten sufficiently advanced that the mind-space these costs inhabit is no longer justified -- and it is OK to do things this way.

Right-side: ORMs suck, just write SQL

The weird part here is you are assuming SQL was even the right thing to begin with.

But sure, if you want to use SQL, then yeah, I agree with you.