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This thread demonstrates that ORM is still (one of several of?) our field's Vietnam war... http://blogs.tedneward.com/post/the-vietnam-of-computer-scie...

On top of the data/frameworks issue there's the one of data locality. Frameworks make the tradeoff decisions for you, but not always the right ones since the right tradeoffs are application-dependent. In one context using a cluster of commodity machines that do a mix of compute for your service and store and shuffle data around is a good idea. In another context a few beefy servers with the beef divided up between the app servers and database servers depending on where most of the compute most efficiently takes place is a better idea. (Though even with poor performance design, hardware is still good enough that a lot of things run just fine by having multiple services on one modest machine. That doesn't stop lots of programmers from reaching for frameworks that demand easily scaleable multi-machine systems even when there's no need and won't ever be need.)

In any case consistency matters: SQL strings are just one form of shipping code to the data to compute remotely instead of retrieving the data and computing locally. When you bring in an ORM, inconsistency is bound to follow with lots of computation that could have been in a query or stored procedure now living in the ORM framework and the application itself.

I can at least understand many people's annoyance with stored procedures though. Most DBs procedural extension languages suck badly enough that shipping JavaScript strings over to NoSQL stores can seem like a big improvement, and various levels of SQL standard conformance is all you typically get to use from the broader design pool of declarative languages.



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