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by thom 852 days ago
It wasn’t always code first - you mention Hibernate but 15-20 years ago it was entirely feasible to inherit a database schema or design one up front, and then create performant metadata mappings to a usable object model. That sort of practise was tainted by the Bad Enterprise brushes of verbosity and XML in general, and so everyone moved to some flavour of active record. This allowed programmers to write less code and fit it into neater boxes, at a time when there was enormous demand for basic CRUD web apps, but a lot of power and expressiveness was lost.

Somewhat ironically, many modern enterprises have peeled all the way back to SQL for a huge amount of logic anyway, so I don’t think we’re done caring about database schemas quite yet.
1 comments
doctor_eval 852 days ago
You are absolutely correct; my previous business ended up ejecting almost all database logic from Java ORMs, and moved almost everything to straight SQL manipulated by stored procedures. Doing so resulted in a significant performance and productivity increase, relative to all the layers of nonsense we used to jump through.

One of the difficulties of doing this was that the tooling isn’t great. We had to write our own tools to make it work, but the benefits of going back to SQL were more than worth it.

(Many years later I made an open source version of that tooling, https://github.com/pgpkg/pgpkg)

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sjwhevvvvvsj 851 days ago
A simple function call as a wrapper for a well optimized sql query just can’t be beat for performance. I have never understood why anybody would use an ORM, it’s usually as much work to learn and maintain them as SQL.
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doctor_eval 851 days ago
Yes, agreed. I spent a few years away from the technical side of things and when I jumped back in I was horrified at the amount of complexity these things added.

In Java it appeared that JPA was trying to completely abstract the database into the JVM, but it just meant a million annoying cache problems, terrible performance, a serious cognitive load, and poor interoperability with other database users.

The guy who promoted this internally kind of wrote the problems off as being a "leaky abstraction" but it wasn't even that. JPA entirely failed to resolve the object-relational "impedance mismatch" by failing to acknowledge that the boundary between the database and the application is actually a legitimate surface, like any other API surface.

What a nightmare it was.

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