Why use ORMs and other notes from our freelancers meet up on 30th July 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On the 30th July, 13 freelancers met in the Lord Nelson Inn, Brighton, to chat all things self employment and tech… and many diversions.
This is some of what we talked about:
- Dealing with recruitment agencies (there is some info about this in this article)
- Google Ads reps are being very aggressive
- The Online Safety Act and why not have a default ID/passport in the UK?
- Voting at age 16
- Pulumi and “infrastructure as code”
- Why ORMs are useful beyond moving database system
- Using LLMs to get concepts into code to help understand them
- Markov chains
- Passing time on flights
- A very entertaining Ryzen chipped gaming cube
- Qubes OS where everything runs in virtualised environments
- 3DTV (yes, really, in 2025!)
- The offerings at Wimpy are getting closer to the South African version
- Two drunk people trying to agree on a project and potential solution
- Gathering varied data into a central store takes data pipelines!
Why use ORMs?
I may have grumpily suggested that I find the use of ORMs (Object Relational Mapping in programming languages and frameworks) a bit annoying and pointless because moving database, a major benefit of ORMs when I first heard about them, is so rare that it shouldn’t be seen as a big benefit of having to use and wrangle with an ORM.
I was firmly reminded of these other benefits of ORMs:
- They make sure information coming in from website users is properly sanitised to prevent simple attacks on your site
- Although SQL is easy to learn, a lot of developers haven’t and an ORM helps them (I say developers would have learnt it if not for ORMs being pushed so hard)
- Some developers use different local setups to live, e.g. running SQLite for a project locally, and PostgreSQL or a heavier database on live
I had forgotten a benefit that I do know and that didn’t come up, and I’m not sure if it is really a feature of the ORM or some frameworks I’ve used: migrations which let you commit a database change to version control and have other people in a team easily change their database too. Also, I know some languages use their ORM so heavily it’s weird to use them without using the ORM to talk to the database.
I’m happy to admit I was perhaps being overly grumpy about them, but we’ve all got to have our foibles and I reserve the right to complain when whatever ORM the framework I’m working in doesn’t do slightly complicated database queries properly.