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Do you need to use an ORM?
TLDR: “No, you don’t.” While ORMs have a place I think they are often used out of ignorance and laziness more than any kind of careful consideration. But read on if you want a few more thoughts on the subject.
After decades of dealing with various ORMs in Java, node, Ruby, .net, go, etc. I always circle back to the fact that it’s often just easier to dispense with the extra level of abstraction and just write the SQL manually. Don’t get me wrong, ORMs are just a tool and like all tools they have their place. ORMs have a use in very specific circumstances but for the most part I believe they are over used.
Now I’m am admittedly a little bias here. My path to becoming a dev didn’t go through a typical UI or Web development path. No, my path went from coding in low level machine and assembler and then had a detour through the land of data modeling and database optimization. So admittedly I personally find writing and thinking in terms of SQL, DDL, and data sets kind of second nature. I do however understand that for many developers, especially those educated in the last 25 years they may have been primarily taught Object Oriented Programming (maybe with a bit of functional programming thrown in at the last minute) Data modeling might have been just one part of one SQL focused class for one semester. For these people ORMs seem like a good bridge between the knowledge and…
