I used to agree 100% with this sentiment, as dissatisfaction with available ORMs at the time (early days of doctrine in PHP) drove me to actually write my own. Turned out an amazing exercise in why orms are hard.
Anyway a few years later I was in a position to start things fresh with a new project so thought to myself, great lets try to do things right this time - so went all the way in the other direction - raw sql everywhere, with some great sql analyzer lib (https://github.com/ivank/potygen) that would strictly type and format with prettier all the queries - kinda plugged all the possible disadvantages of raw query usage and was a breeze to work with … for me.
What I learned was that ORMs have other purposes - they kinda force you to think about the data model (even if giving you fewer tools to do so) With the amount of docs and tutorials out there it allows even junior members of the team to feel confident about building the system. I’m pretty used to sql, and thinking in it and its abstractions is easy for me, but its a skill a lot of modern devs have not acquired with all of our document dbs and orms so it was really hard on them to switch from thinking in objects and the few ways orms allows you to link them, to thinking in tables and the vast amounts of operations and dependencies you can build with them. Indexable json fields, views, CTEs, window functions all that on top of the usual relation theory … it was quite a lot to learn.
And the thing is while you can solve a lot of problems with raw sql, orms usually have plugins and extensions that solve common problems, things like soft delete, i18n, logs and audit, etc. Its easy even if its far from simple. With raw sql you have to deal with all that yourself, and while it can be done and done cleanly, still require intuition about performance characteristics that a lot of new devs just don’t possess yet. You need to be an sql expert to solve those in a reasonable manner while, a mid dev could easily string along a few plugins and call it a day. Would it have great performance? Probably not. Would it hold some future pitfalls because they did not understand the underlying sql? Absolutely! But hay it will work, at least for a while. And to be fair they would easily do those mistakes with raw sql as well, but with far few resources to understand why it would fail, because orms fail in predictable ways and there is usually tons of relevant blog posts and such about how to fix it.
It just allows for an better learning curve - learn a bit, build, fail, learn more, fix, repeat. Whereas raw sql requires a big upfront “learn” cost, while still going through the “fail” step more often than not.
Now I’m trying out a fp query builder / ORM - elixir’s ecto with the hopes that it gives me the best of both worlds … time will tell.
Anyway a few years later I was in a position to start things fresh with a new project so thought to myself, great lets try to do things right this time - so went all the way in the other direction - raw sql everywhere, with some great sql analyzer lib (https://github.com/ivank/potygen) that would strictly type and format with prettier all the queries - kinda plugged all the possible disadvantages of raw query usage and was a breeze to work with … for me.
What I learned was that ORMs have other purposes - they kinda force you to think about the data model (even if giving you fewer tools to do so) With the amount of docs and tutorials out there it allows even junior members of the team to feel confident about building the system. I’m pretty used to sql, and thinking in it and its abstractions is easy for me, but its a skill a lot of modern devs have not acquired with all of our document dbs and orms so it was really hard on them to switch from thinking in objects and the few ways orms allows you to link them, to thinking in tables and the vast amounts of operations and dependencies you can build with them. Indexable json fields, views, CTEs, window functions all that on top of the usual relation theory … it was quite a lot to learn.
And the thing is while you can solve a lot of problems with raw sql, orms usually have plugins and extensions that solve common problems, things like soft delete, i18n, logs and audit, etc. Its easy even if its far from simple. With raw sql you have to deal with all that yourself, and while it can be done and done cleanly, still require intuition about performance characteristics that a lot of new devs just don’t possess yet. You need to be an sql expert to solve those in a reasonable manner while, a mid dev could easily string along a few plugins and call it a day. Would it have great performance? Probably not. Would it hold some future pitfalls because they did not understand the underlying sql? Absolutely! But hay it will work, at least for a while. And to be fair they would easily do those mistakes with raw sql as well, but with far few resources to understand why it would fail, because orms fail in predictable ways and there is usually tons of relevant blog posts and such about how to fix it.
It just allows for an better learning curve - learn a bit, build, fail, learn more, fix, repeat. Whereas raw sql requires a big upfront “learn” cost, while still going through the “fail” step more often than not.
Now I’m trying out a fp query builder / ORM - elixir’s ecto with the hopes that it gives me the best of both worlds … time will tell.