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Comment by rtpg

If you're going to end up querying all the fields and putting them into a model like this dataclass anyways... Django can do that for you. If you're going to later pick and choose what fields you query on the first load, and defer other data til later.... Django can do that for you. If you're going to have some foreign relations you want to easily query.... Django can do that for you. If you're doing a bunch of joins and are using some custom postgres extensions for certain fields and filtering... Django can help you organize the integration code cleanly.

I totally understand people having issues with Django's ORM due to the query laziness making performance tricky to reason about (since an expression might or might not trigger a query depending on the context). In some specialized cases there are some real performance hits from the model creation. But Django is very good at avoiding weird SQL issues, does a lot of things correctly the first time around, and also includes wonderful things like a migration layer.

You might have a database that is _really_ unamenable to something like an ORM (like if most of your tables don't have ID rows), but I wonder how much of the wisdom around ORMs is due to people being burned by half-baked ORMs over the years.

I am curious as to what a larger codebase with "just SQL queries all over" ends up looking like. I have to imagine they all end up with some (granted, specialized) query builder pattern. But I think my bias is influenced by always working on software where there are just so many columns per table that it would be way too much busywork to not use something.

parent rtpg 3 years ago

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