I don't disagree with any of the major gripes people have with orms and I find SQL to be much cleaner in a lot of circumstances.

That being said, if orms didn't force you to explicitly define your domain models about 60% of developers would simply never do it. And you would see differently structured, ad-hoc interfaces defined all over the code base completely entangled with whatever action they are trying to perform.

ORMs being a forcing function for domain modeling is enough benefit for me that it outweighs all of their obvious limitations.

Why not both? ORMs for the simpler CRUD operations, SQL when it gets a little hectic.

The author basically says this in the first paragraph, but the title (and some of the language the author uses) implies that people should just use SQL.

It's a reasonable article pointing out some of the annoyances and problems of ORMs (especially in the Java world, where they tend to be overengineered) but there are still a lot of advantages to them if you are in an OO language and they used in a reasonable way.

The problem with ORMs is that they look kludgy without language support - which is why Hibernate in Java looks painful, while DotNet's EF looks like magic. I wrote something similar called TinqerJS - https://tinqerjs.org, which is like Entity Framework but for TypeScript.

There's immense value in everything being typed from the API down to the DB queries.

  // EF-inspired type-safe API in TypeScript
  const query = (q) =>
    q
      .from("users")
      .where((u) => u.age >= 18 && u.email.includes("@company.com"))
      .orderBy((u) => u.name)
      .select((u) => ({ id: u.id, name: u.name, email: u.email }));

Of course, ORMs are not for all queries in your project, and may not be a good fit for some projects. That goes without saying. The problem with the article is that it's dismissing ORMs by looking at specific implementations.

I generally like ORMs but recognize that they have a lot of problems. The most common problem that I've seen is when an ORM makes it easy to select records in a way that looks efficient but really is not. Strictly speaking, this isn't a failure of the ORM itself -- it's the fault of the developer who is using the ORM and also the developer that didn't catch it in code review. But it's a case where the ORM is making work for everyone and obscuring legibility into the code instead of saving time and providing clarity.

I've written complicated stuff where an ORM isn't appropriate, but if I'm honest, a large fraction of what I've done in my career is just making boring software to automate menial clerical work, and ORMs are good enough for those kinds of projects.

I used to love ORMs so much that I built one for Java, in the early 90s, and it was one of the main offerings of a startup that I joined. I have come around 180 degrees. My rethink started when a developer at a Wall Street bank said: having Oracle on my resume is valuable. Having your ORM on my resume is not.

And then there’s the “now you have two problems” dynamic. You not only have to write high-performing queries, but you have to get the ORM to generate that query for you. And sometimes you don’t want objects. And the schema mapping has to track schema changes.

Just write the damned SQL, it’s not that difficult.

The big problem is that raw SQL has pretty bad type inference and linting support in most editors. A query builder can still give you a lot of type safety benefits.

The argument that really hits home for me, after 30+ years in this industry, is stored procedures. The “Stored Procedures are Evil” argument to me is an artifact of an industry that promotes treating engineers and infrastructure as entirely interchangeable and anything that gets in the way of that is Evil(tm). But what working at Salesforce in the 2000’s taught me is that you can do really amazing things if you’re willing to invest heavily in understanding your infrastructure and specializing the hell out of it. Of course that created Oracle lock-in for Salesforce, but that lock-in was the result of Oracle having capabilities that simply didn’t exist elsewhere that Salesforce needed to scale. I would argue Google took that same idea and 100X’d it by building the capabilities they needed when they needed them. In the case of stored procedures, I think if you find yourself fetching huge amounts of data and then doing complex manipulation to it that you can’t do with SQL, consider doing it with stored procedures in the engine and greatly simplifying your application. It may just work out!

There are simple "ORM"s that just map classes to tables and columns to attributes. Basically focused on serialization instead of query generation. I find those to be a good balance.

As someone who started their programming journey with SQL, it just feels so odd hearing about learning SQL being presented as an useful option. I get it, it just feels odd. SQL was considered table stakes in the financial IT world - if you said you didn't know SQL, people would look at you funny.

    > You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon.

I was against ORMs until I used EF Core in .NET which I really loved. A good ORM is amazing for productivity and when needed you can always write raw SQL.

I don't use .NET anymore but lately I've been happy with Drizzle for TS. It's very performant and expressive. After years it seems that they're finally going to release v1.0 soon.

Personally I would never go back to writing all my queries with SQL, manually mapping the results, etc.