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by p2detar 208 days ago
> What was unexpected was the underlying differences in how Go and Python communicate with the database layer. Python uses an ORM to make querying and writing to our Postgres store a bit simpler. We don’t use an ORM for our Golang services at Reddit, and some unknown underlying optimizations on Python’s ORM resulted in some database pressure when we started ramping up our new Go endpoint. Luckily, we caught on early and were able to optimize our queries in Go.

A few weeks ago I was evaluating Hibernate for Java again, since my product is expected to support 2 different databases next year. In the end I decided to keep the codebase ORM free, because it’s much easier to me to directly debug our SQL queries than trying to find what and why Hibernate does exactly. I think I’m done using ORMs for the foreseeable future.

2 comments

I don't think "Python" uses an ORM, moreso they did. You can write the SQL the same way there. It's why there is SQLAlchemy Core Vs SQLAlchemy ORM.
That’s actually poorly written on their part. I did assume they were using an ORM Python library, not that ORM is somehow implicit in Python. But after rereading it, I can see how someone without any Python experience might think otherwise.
yeah - largely a reason why people went to nosql. due to the performance hit you get with ORMs. in ruby-verse you can see this active-record vs sequel(a better orm) the performance gap.

now there's better tools like sqlc etc that have orm ergonomics without the performance hit.

at times just use nosql