Some backend libraries let you write SQL queries as they are and deliver them to the database. They still handle making the connection, pooling, etc.
ORMs introduce a different API for making SQL queries, with the aim to make it easier. But I find them always subpar to SQL, and often times they miss advanced features (and sometimes not even those advanced).
It also means every time I use a ORM, I have to learn this ORM’s API.
SQL is already a high level language abstracting inner workings of the database. So I find the promise of ease of use not to beat SQL. And I don’t like abstracting an already high level abstraction.
Alright, I admit, there are a few advantages:
- if I don’t know SQL and don’t plan on learning it, it is easier to learn a ORM
- if I want better out of the box syntax highlighting (as SQL queries may be interpreted as pure strings)
- if I want to use structures similar to my programming language (classes, functions, etc).
But ultimately I find these benefits far outweighed by the benefits of pure sql.
I’m also a big fan of raw SQL. Most ORMs are fine for CRUD stuff, but the moment you want to start using the “relational” part of the database (which… that’s the whole point) they start to irritate me. They also aren’t free - if you’re lucky, you pay at comptime (Rust’s Diesel) but I think a lot of ORMs do everything at runtime via reflection and the like.
For CRUD stuff, I usually just define some interface(s) that take a query and manually bind/extract
structfields. This definitely wouldn’t scale, but it’s fine when you only a handful of tables and it keeps the abstraction/performance tradeoff low.