ORMs. I didn’t “buy” Hibernate but we adopted it and the whole JavaEE thing wholesale. What a disaster. Learned a lot of lessons from that, #1 being, don’t use an abstraction layer (ORM) to abstract away another abstraction layer (SQL).

The performance of Hibernate relative to plain SQL was abominable, and this directly caused us to lose at least one contract. It turns out - on reflection, of course - that it’s not even theoretically possible to get into the same performance ballpark.

After years of doing battle with the tools, I eventually kicked them all out, decided to work hand-in-glove with the database, and suddenly things became both straightforward and performant. I now think that ORMs are a code smell.

Type safe APIs for SQL are the happy medium.

What do you mean by this - do you have a specific example?

I think that he means generating application code from a database schema. A tool like Jooq (https://www.jooq.org/). If so, then I agree with him.

But even without codegen you'd still a much nicer interface than manually hacking together strings as the Golang example others have linked shows: https://github.com/Masterminds/squirrel