Way back in 2006, I spent a week or so trying to use ORM in a project I was working on, only to discover that rather than making my life easier, it constantly prevented me from doing what I wanted to do. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convert SQL queries into ORM, but I kept ending up with slower, more complicated messes. And since this particular project required me to pull information out of very large databases very quickly, I was never completely comfortable trusting an abstraction layer to optimize SQL queries as well as I could.
It’s been a few years since I’ve developed software full-time, but since I still encounter articles about how great ORM is, I figured that either the situation has improved since then, or maybe I was just too stupid to harness the power of ORM. But then I found someone who has come to the same conclusions I did way back in 2006, and has written about them a lot more eloquently than I did in my original rant. At least I’m not alone anymore!