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Preslav Rachev
  1. My Writings /Programming /

❝ In Defense of ORMs

·1 min

This time, I went back to 2011 to prove to myself (and hopefully, others too) that ORMs are still valuable:

[…] there is a fundamental parity mismatch between SQL and imperative code. It’s certainly valid that ORMs are one of the leakiest abstractions imaginable, and therefore they are poor abstractions on the continuum of abstraction quality. That’s a fundamental challenge of using SQL regardless of whether you are using an ORM or not. Writing your SQL by hand does nothing to address that, you still have to convert back and forth between imperative code and data structures to SQL and flat rows of data. The challenge of doing this well and creating a nice interface is the whole reason there are so many different ORMs and why they vary so widely in form and function.

In Defense of ORMs
Laurie Voss just posted an article that ORM is an anti-pattern in which he calls out ActiveRecord (although nothing about ActiveRecord is specifically cited) as doing more harm than good. Some of the flaws he mentions are real issues, but he hand-wavingly dismisses the benefits without any real analysis. Let’s examine the claims:

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