[teaearlgraycold]

> There's nothing stopping anyone from writing their own DAO layer with bespoke SQL statements and allowing intellisense to index the API over the top of that.

That sounds like a homebrew ORM. It could end up being better than any out-of-the-box solution. Or you could make a spaghetti code mess. But I’d rather spend my time elsewhere.

In my opinion the bespoke app code is the center of everything. The database is on the periphery and should conform to my needs as a software engineer building a user facing product. I need to live in reality, though, and understand the database accessed through an ORM is a leaky abstraction. But for many common use cases (find by ID, update a field for a row, etc) I can forget that it’s Postgres under the hood.

I know SQL well enough, understand how to craft a decent schema, how to keep the database happy as tables grow in size. But the main job is writing web app code, not operating as a DBA.

I operate on the principle that the center of the app can be determined by finding where most of the bullshit is. For an app where you’ve got some tables and indexes, the database is too idyllic to be the center of bullshit. Your app code probably has 1000x more bugs and spaghetti to it.