The Perfect ORM
Some folks are tired of ORMs and raise a good point regarding exposing SQL generation in ORM libs. Most of the time when I use an ORM, there is a moment where I wish I could just get on with things. The declarative approach for creating tables usually is one hurdle that annoys me. Another is defining relations, since it seems so trivial to do that sort of thing in the query. At the same time, I'm far from a heavy database user and can imagine my "it's so simple" mindset quickly deteriorating to massive complexity without much work. Though, I always did like the web.py db layer. It pretty much gave you queries and returned the results in objects. Pretty simple stuff. I think it also let you update those objects and that would be persisted in the DB, but I could be wrong about that. At one time I tried to use it on its own but didn't have much luck. One gotcha is that the db layer depended on running within web.py and had expectations for keeping a threadpool and the like. Thinking back, it could have been very helpful if web.py's db layer did provide some helpers for writing SQL. Based on the article and the comments, it sounds like SQLAlchemy is already able to expose the query mechanism. I'm not sure how this works within the scope of providing model objects, but it sounds pretty promising nonetheless. Likewise, Dejavu, a personal favorite excels an improving queries via translation from language constructs. The NoSQL movement is partially exciting because instead of thinking about relational algebra you think about looping and applying functions. Dejavu uses the same ideas and exposes the Python to SQL translation with its Geniusql lib. Even though I don't really use databases very often, it is interesting to see how people are handling the progressive issues of using an ORM in the real world. Just as databases aren't dead, I believe ORMs are still very important and will most likely become even more important. There is a ton of well tested boilerplate code in ORMs that make creating models much easier. My guess is that even in a world full of NoSQL, we'll still see ORMs help out when it comes to keeping tabs on domain objects. What we won't see is one ORM that supports every database or persistence layer known to man, although there will be people who try to write it.
