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Having written a non-ORM Go-Postgres tool [1] similar to sqlc, I'm a big fan of this article, especially their acknowledgment that using SQL moves the eng culture towards data-centric engineering. Some thoughts:
- Application code should not rely on database table structure (like the ActiveRecord pattern). Modeling the database as a bunch of queries is a better bet since you can change the underlying table structure but keep the same query semantics to allow for database refactoring.
- Database code and queries should be defined in SQL. I'm not a fan of defining the database in another programming language that generates DDL for you since it's another layer of abstraction that usually leaks heavily.
- One of the main drawbacks of writing queries in plain SQL is that dynamic queries are more difficult to write. I haven't found that to be too much of a problem since you can use multiple queries or push some of the dynamic parts into a SQL predicate. Some things are easier with an ORM, like dynamic ordering or dynamic group-by clauses.
[1]: https://github.com/jschaf/pggen
Similar comment from a few months ago comparing Go approaches to SQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28463938
I've been a huge fan of Slonik, https://github.com/gajus/slonik, which makes it easy and safe to write direct SQL queries. The author of Slonik had a good article about the downsides of query builders, previously discussed on HN, that I totally agree with: https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf41...
Shameless plug: I'm working with a small team on a data framework that replaces the ORM with an abstraction the eliminates the impedance mismatch. You can take a look at https://github.com/zeidon/zeidon-joe . I'd be happy to answer questions.
https://github.com/Divergence/framework/blob/6af1b6b0e56b25c...
Where people go wrong is trying to do this field normalization logic inside their query builder. That leads to all sorts of problems. The query builder shouldn't know what is going on with your ORM at all. It's just gluing strings together to form a query.
You can see my dead simple query builder here: https://github.com/Divergence/framework/tree/develop/src/IO/...
I honestly used to not have one as it's so simple but decided it was a good abstraction to assimilate from other frameworks. My query builder does not attempt to sanitize anything. The ActiveRecord class takes care of that through the data mapping conversion functions for all the basic HTTP CRUD functionality.
This isn't new. A lot of applications and libraries do this. And I think it is a good way to design things.
Usually the database I use to develop a SQL schema is Sqlite3, since it allows for really nice testing. Then I add PostgreSQL support (which requires more involved testing setup, but I have a library that makes this somewhat easier: https://github.com/borud/drydock). (SQLite being in C is a bit of a problem since it means I can't get a purely statically linked binary on all platforms - at least I haven't found a way to do that except on Linux. So if anyone has some opinions on alternatives in pure Go, I'm all ears)
In the Java days JDBC every single method implementing some operation would be a lot of boilerplate. JDBC wasn't a very good API. But in Go that is much less of a problem. In part because you have struct tags, and libraries like Sqlx. To that I also add some helper functions to deal with result/error combos. Turns out the majority of my interactions with SQL databases can be carried out in 1-3 lines of code - with a surprising number of cases just being a oneliner. (The performance hit from using Sqlx is in most cases so minimal it doesn't matter. If it matters to you: use Sqlx when modeling and evolving the persistence, and then optimize it out if you must. I think I've done that just once in about 100kLOC worth of code written over the last few years).
And best of all: I get to deal with the database as a database. I write SQL DDL statements to define the schema, and SQL to perform the transactions. I don't have to pretend it is a object model, so I can make full use of the SQL. (Well, actually, I try to make do as far as possible with trivial SQL, but that's a whole different discussion). The interface type takes care of exposing the persistence in a way that fits the application.
(Another thing I've started experimenting with a bit is to return channels or objects containing channels instead of arrays of things. But there is still some experimenting that needs to be done to find a pleasing design)
Author said it isn't[0] a year ago but not sure. I think it allows a couple of strategies to be used.
[0] https://github.com/mikro-orm/mikro-orm/issues/403