object-relational mappers

[Jason Scheirer]

On Apr 1, 1:40 pm, Aaron Watters <aaron.watt... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been poking around the world of object-relational
> mappers and it inspired me to coin a corellary to the
> the famous quote on regular expressions:
>
> "You have objects and a database: that's 2 problems.
> So: get an object-relational mapper:
> now you have 2**3 problems."
>
> That is to say I feel that they all make me learn
> so much about the internals and features of the
> O-R mapper itself that I would be better off rolling
> my own queries on an as-needed basis without
> wasting so many brain cells.
>
> comments?
>
>    -- Aaron Watters
>
> ===http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FREETEXT=mild+exponenti...

You're going to have to learn how any of the OR mappers work to get
anything reasonable out of them, and you are going to need to commit
and invest the time to learn how one works. I would argue that you
should try making a prototype using one or two OR mappers (or just use
SQLAlchemy/Elixir and be done with it) with your existing database and
see which most efficiently does what you need it to. If you get to the
point where the queries are getting too complex to reasonably manage
as python code, then yeah, use raw SQL because that is what it's good
for. Most OR mappers will allow you to sprinkle in raw SQL as needed.

I think it's natural to be paralyzed by all the choices you have, but
just start writing some code and go from there.