Is there a programming language specifically designed for interacting with SQL databases that avoids the need for Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs) to solve impedance mismatch from the start?
If such a language exists, would it be a viable alternative to PHP or Go for a web backend project?
You can still do that.
For example, you’d still write classes for your tables:
public class Users { public int Id { get; set; } }and then you’d just do
var query = $"select * from {(nameof(Users))} where {(nameof(Users.Id))} = 10;";That let’s you write raw sql about as close as it gets, while still having some degree of type-safety. You could drop a query like that into Dapper, and you’re pretty close to just using raw sql.
I don’t see why I’d do that over
db.Users .Where(u => u.UserId == 10) .ToListAsync();Which will produce pretty much the exact same sql under the hood but be 100x easier to read, maintain, and debug.
Because just Dapper will perform a lot better executing raw sql queries than EF having to go through an entire expression tree builder.
Anyway, I wasn’t saying that that example is a better way than doing it with EF, I was just going over your points where you mentioned that with raw SQL it’s just all unreferenced magic strings with no references to tables or columns. And that you can’t find where anything is used.
So that’s just to explain - if you write your sql inside code in the poorest possible way - yea, you’re gonna have a poor experience. But if you want to write raw sql instead of using an ORM, it’s pretty easy to negate all those downsides about not having references
I’d like to see some benchmarks on truly how much this difference matters when running on the cloud.
I expect latency alone between the App<->Db will dwarf whatever microseconds your raw sql would save that it’s hard to distinguish from the chaos of latency variance.