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by jgalt212
4546 days ago
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I dunno. I just don't get ORMs. I certainly see their use case in easy prototyping, but with the advent of NoSQL, why not just prototype with MongoDB, or similar, and if it turns out your data is close to uniform in structure, just switch over to MySQL, or similar. To keep my code portable, I stick to standard SQL and don't use any stored procedures. I'm sure this is probably not a tenable strategy for web-scale apps, but with 100s/1000s of users and only millions of records, it seems to work just fine. This comment is no way meant to disparage SQLAlchemy which by all accounts seems to be a first rate work of engineering. I am speaking of ORMs in general, and why should we use them. |
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* Ability to programmatically add to/chain queries. It's really simple to add an additional "WHERE" clause in an ORM query; it's much harder to do so with a SQL string, where you have to account for escaping, comma placement, etc.
* Ability to automatically join entities in some cases, which can save on verbosity.
* Ability to add methods and attributes to models, which can abstract away additional queries or queries that might normally be really complex.
It's debatable if ORMs really add that much to productivity. I use them in some projects, and forgo them in others. For Python, I'm a big fan of Pony ORM because it can greatly reduce verbosity and basically maps Python code directly to SQL; I don't really use it for the relational "mapping" though: http://ponyorm.com/