
Ask HN: What are your experiences with ORMs? - varrock
Do you prefer to use an ORM in your backend, or would you rather write raw SQL queries?
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davismwfl
Depends on what I am doing. For a quick MVP or testing of an idea, I prefer a
simple ORM. For a final product I usually like to move it into a data access
layer that uses hand written SQL.

I've also used an ORM and then just hand tuned certain queries, but overall I
find this takes longer in the end and makes the code harder to pick up for new
people.

My complaint about most ORMs is they add a significant amount of code and
complexity to both the application and the database. And in my experiences,
most software engineers favor the ORM and then the database design suffers,
typically meaning performance/scale becomes an issue way sooner than it
should. Or if you have a good database design then the ORM requires lots of
hand tuning to get it to execute proper joins and queries to minimize the
database pressure. So by the time you are done with all the compromises and
hand tweaking you could have just written the damn queries and been done and
not compromised nearly as much.

