Re^3: Whip Me, Beat Me, Make Me Use ORMs

When you work with many tables and gigabytes of data, you have to fine-tune many queries. The last time I had these problems, this tuning was not that easy because an ORM is kind of a blackbox - RDO probably less than others. I ended up with ugly code that was not more maintainable than plain DBI code. Well, probably I am someone who does silly things with ORMs ;)

But I really like RDO, so I'd interested in reading more about things you should consider (probably starting with the db schema) when you go beyond little webapp databases ;)

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Re^4: Whip Me, Beat Me, Make Me Use ORMs by perrin (Chancellor) on Jun 29, 2007 at 18:27 UTC
You're correct: complicated queries on large databases are no place for an ORM. Rose is pretty fast for simple-to-medium queries, but complex ones always require hand-tweaked SQL. You can run hand-written SQL through Rose though (or others), and it can still provide a convenient place to organize your custom queries and deal with your database handle/statement caching. I would also add that ORMs are never good for bulk updates. You can totally crush the speed of an ORM for a bulk insert/update by writing some simple DBI code or by using your database's bulk loading features, e.g. multi-row insert in MySQL.	[reply]

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Re^4: Whip Me, Beat Me, Make Me Use ORMs
by perrin (Chancellor) on Jun 29, 2007 at 18:27 UTC

You're correct: complicated queries on large databases are no place for an ORM. Rose is pretty fast for simple-to-medium queries, but complex ones always require hand-tweaked SQL. You can run hand-written SQL through Rose though (or others), and it can still provide a convenient place to organize your custom queries and deal with your database handle/statement caching.

I would also add that ORMs are never good for bulk updates. You can totally crush the speed of an ORM for a bulk insert/update by writing some simple DBI code or by using your database's bulk loading features, e.g. multi-row insert in MySQL.

[reply]