Why ORMs Aren't Always a Great Idea

1

Typescript

If you look into the fun projects I've built during hackathons or other events on my GitHub, you will see that most (if not all) projects use the Prisma ORM for TypeScript.

#Programming Language #OOP #Generic Programming Language 25 social mentions

2

Prisma GraphQL API

As mentioned above, ORMs probably aren't a great long-term decision, but they come with a lot of upsides. With something like Prisma, you can generate types from your schema and use them in your application, saving you a tremendous amount of development time in places like hackathons where every minute of your time is valuable.

#Project Management #Workflow Automation #Web Service Automation 63 social mentions

3

PostgreSQL

ORMs tend to just obscure what is going on. If I know SQL and PostgreSQL, I can essentially understand just about ANY project that uses them, without having to learn the specifics of one of two dozen ORMs with its own idiosyncrasies. If you are a startup that uses an ORM, then essentially the developers working on your product will always interact with the database through an ORM preventing them from developing any understanding of how the underlying database technology works. Due to the nature of different databases, you will have use cases where powerful database features might come into use. The fact that an ORM gives you an advantage in migrating to other database easily is something which simply isn't that common in reality. If a company does end up doing that however, it isn't that hard to incorporate those change into your SQL. As I've mentioned countless times above, for any non-trivial use case, you will need to use SQL.

#Databases #Relational Databases #NoSQL Databases 15 social mentions

4

Go Programming Language

In the end, I think ORMs are an nice tool if used appropriately in the correct scenario. Once you balance out the positives and negatives however, it may seem that including an ORM in your stack may not be the best idea once your startup scales. I love tools which make SQL easier to work with! There's something called sqlc which basically compiles SQL to type-safe Go. Tools like this provide us with some of the same advantages as an ORM, just without effecting our actual database workflow.

#Programming Language #OOP #Generic Programming Language 290 social mentions