Programming

17392 readers

151 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

I wish writing SQL queries was more popular than ORMs (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by cyclohexane@lemmy.ml to c/programming@programming.dev

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Some backend libraries let you write SQL queries as they are and deliver them to the database. They still handle making the connection, pooling, etc.

ORMs introduce a different API for making SQL queries, with the aim to make it easier. But I find them always subpar to SQL, and often times they miss advanced features (and sometimes not even those advanced).

It also means every time I use a ORM, I have to learn this ORM's API.

SQL is already a high level language abstracting inner workings of the database. So I find the promise of ease of use not to beat SQL. And I don't like abstracting an already high level abstraction.

Alright, I admit, there are a few advantages:

if I don't know SQL and don't plan on learning it, it is easier to learn a ORM
if I want better out of the box syntax highlighting (as SQL queries may be interpreted as pure strings)
if I want to use structures similar to my programming language (classes, functions, etc).

But ultimately I find these benefits far outweighed by the benefits of pure sql.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

and how you run your tests? Do you spawn a DB backend for test purposes?

[–] azezeB@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, I create a dedicated dB in the test phase.

[–] MajorHavoc@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As another option in this case:

I've been able to write unit tests for SQL within the database to address testing important business logic that exists in SQL. The test fixtures just become stored (version controlled) database scripts to set needed test data in place in the test DB. Then we still mock over the db call in the code for unit tests as usual.

It's more effort up front, but I find it much easier to maintain complex DB interactions inside the DB, isolated from the downstream consumer code.

Obviously, there's an art to knowing when this is needed, or appropriate. I've worked for organizations where almost everything important was a performant SQL query. In that org, maintenance got dramatically simpler and the product more reliable when we started writing SQL tests after moving important DB work directly into the DB.