Comment by Eikon

Composability is the often cited benefit. As an example, I can do the following in Active Record (Ruby):

  class Account < ApplicationRecord
    scope :active, -> { where.not(active_at: nil) }

    belongs_to :user
  end

  class User < ApplicationRecord
    scope :born_before, ->(born_on) { where(birthdate: born_on) }
  end

  active_users_with_birthdays_today = Account.active.joins(:user).merge(User.born_before(Date.today))

Writing raw SQL is perhaps indeed easier for simple queries, but put some foreign keys inside or slightly more complex relationships between tables and you'll probably quickly fall into the trap of having to remember your entire database schema to write anything. Yes, the example from the documentation is slightly more complicated, but it checks at compile time the exact column names and types, so you get feedback much quicker than actually running the SQL query.

In addition to that, over the years of writing web services, I always found raw queries much less maintainable. The ORM immediately tells you that you messed up your refactoring, whether it is just renaming a column, or removing a table completely.

Pretty much every ORM (including the one in Cot) also allows you to write your own custom queries if the abstractions are not enough, so there's always this fallback option.

I've yet to see an ORM which doesn't just eventually make everything harder. Especially when it comes to automatic migrations, which seldom seem to take into account production necessities like multi-node deployment, downtime considerations and not destroying your production data silently because it doesn't fit.

It's 2025, and some ORMs are quite good (eg. Django, ActiveRecord). You can have an ORM with escape hatch of SQL. I do not understand the people who are so against ORMs.

I use ORM query interfaces 80% of the time, and for performance critical queries I can use direct SQL. But the query sanitization, smart preloading and performance checks, schema management and migration tools they often provide, and type checks / hints are really nice features of ORMs.

Furthermore, ORMs are ESPECIALLY useful in teams where you have more junior devs who need these guardrails.

I think the issue here is trying to reinvent a new ORM.

As long as it's still possible to also use SQL queries with it it's fine, right? I know some people who prefer using ORMs and some who like writing SQL.

Nah. The query is $slug == LimitedString::new("cot")

Also, people like ORMs. Type safety is nice too without having to map manually. Sqlx is also great

ORMs, in my experience, fail the hardest when DB admins and web devs butt heads in when and where to create models. It can be an extra hurdle for data flexibility, but it clarifies data architecture at the beginning. In our Django environment, the DB admins won and we added `MIGRATE = False`.

I never worked with Rust, but maybe the complexity is due to how the language works.

Using Django's ORM, that would simply be: link=Link.objects.get(slug="cot")

It'd still be very readable and manageable even for complex queries.

ORMs are great. They afford abundant opportunities to look like a hero by swooping into a project and cutting a page load of forty seconds to under one second.

if you can decompose the query, you can unit test the logic against inmemory sets(or language specific equivalent).