[DrewADesign]

I’m glad you’re head-over-heels in love with Postgres— it’s really cool, and I’ve occasionally had projects that really benefited from it… but most of those incredible features just aren’t useful for run-of-the-mill projects. Learning how to profile your ORM queries is a lot easier than maintaining a bunch of code from a different language embedded into your code base. If you’re writing articles about Postgres, you probably have no idea how much of a PITA that context switch is in practice. It’s funny how getting expertise in something can make it more difficult to understand why it’s useful to other people, and how they use it.

[manuelabeledo]

There are projects, like SQLC, that cover most of the perceived advantages of ORMs, without the downsides.

One of these downsides is, in my opinion, the fact that they hide the very details of the implementation one necessarily needs to understand, in order to debug it.

[DrewADesign]

Let me just say that I wrote my first (professional) SQL queries about 25 years ago and at various post points have worked extensively with Postgres, a bit less so with Oracle, and occasionally with MySQL and MSSQL. (And also some of the JSON object store databases before switching to Postgres for that stuff.) The only ones I’ve used ORMs with are Postgres and MySQL.

SQLC does not address most of the perceived advantages to ORMs. Sure it addresses some of the concerns of hand-writing and sending SQL to databases from various languages, but that’s not what most people I’ve spoken to in the past couple of decades most valued about ORMs. What most projects really need databases for is some place to essentially store context-sensitive variable values. Like what email address to send something to if the user ID is 12345. I’ve never, ever had to debug ORM’s SQL when doing things like that. Rarely have I needed to with more complex chains of filters or whatnot, and that usually involved taking a slightly different approach with the given ORM tools rather than modifying them or writing my own SQL. When I’ve had more complex needs that required using some of the more exotic Postgres features, writing my own queries has been trivial. It’s of paramount importance for developers to understand the frameworks and libraries, such as ORMs, they’re using because those implementation details touch everything in your code. Once you understand that, the code your ORM composes to make your queries is an IDE-click away.

Not having to context switch between writing SQL and whatever native language you’re working in, especially for simple tasks, has yielded so so so much more to my time and mental space than being exactly 100% sure that my code is using that left join in exactly the way I want it to.