What is it about coders and blogs that brings out the "cranky old man" vibe?
An ORM is an insanely convenient way for newbies to use various data stores while avoid learning umpteen different query languages. The teaching value of ActiveRecord for newbies is hard to overstate. It's also a damn nice way to move your application closer to platform independence – a valuable thing in today's PaaS integrated stacks.
If you seek efficiency and performance, don't use an ORM. Lick the freezing cold metal, if you want. Nothing is stopping you from doing what you like!
(Also, I haven't dropped down to SQL since Rails 3.x and meta_where. Yes, I realize that my applications "won't scale". They are appropriately scaled for their intended purposes.)
It's not just for newbies. I'm competent with SQL, but that doesn't mean I enjoy writing query after query. We use Django and utilize the ORM... we jump down into SQL in the (rare) case that we really need too.
I'm sure at higher scale (we're mid-level at this point) that we might be hand tuning more and more, but that hasn't happened yet.
> An ORM is an insanely convenient way for newbies to use various data stores while avoid learning umpteen different query languages
Let's count these umpteen different query languages: (1) SQL,
(2) ... ?
> If you seek efficiency and performance, don't use an ORM.
If you don't need efficiency and performance, why use a DBMS at all? Isn't the whole point of a DBMS to make data access not only secure but also efficient (B-tree indexes, etc.)?
The variants of SQL are different between different databases.
Even the data-types supported are different.
It's not uncommon for consumer and enterprise products to have to work with different databases. In the case of a consumer product, it'd be a client having only one database type installed and requiring that your software use it. You benefit by writing in an ORM because you can have the same codebase for multiple db installs.
With enterprise customers it'll be having multiple databases installed at once, and having your code interface between all of them. You benefit with the ORM by not having to remember and handcode all of the query differences.
An ORM is an insanely convenient way for newbies to use various data stores while avoid learning umpteen different query languages. The teaching value of ActiveRecord for newbies is hard to overstate. It's also a damn nice way to move your application closer to platform independence – a valuable thing in today's PaaS integrated stacks.
If you seek efficiency and performance, don't use an ORM. Lick the freezing cold metal, if you want. Nothing is stopping you from doing what you like!
(Also, I haven't dropped down to SQL since Rails 3.x and meta_where. Yes, I realize that my applications "won't scale". They are appropriately scaled for their intended purposes.)