Object Relational Mappers - Time Saver or Programming Hack?

If you have anything to do with development, you have probably heard about “Object Relational Mappers”, or ORMs before.  There is a lot of information available on what they are, but most are overly technical, not objective, or both.  So for those of you who aren’t directly involved in writing code, here’s my attempt at describing the purpose and use of ORMs.

ORMs are essentially tools to allow developers to map information in a database to classes in the business logic layer with a relatively small amount of effort.  The productivity gains can be significant, since some ORMs help the developer create objects, data access code, and update code easily after a database change.  From a developer’s perspective, ORMs can be handy because they can effectively translate between the tabular database storage model to “objects” that exist in code.

Despite their uses, ORMs have a lot of detractors within the programming community, especially with some of the more skilled open source developers.  Actual complaints vary, but the gist of their arguments is that these tools don’t generate objects or data access code that operate as efficiently as can be.  The code generated does not meet their standards of quality, and therefore they argue ORMs should be shunned.

Since most developers do not have unlimited time, I’d suggest using some sort of ORM whenever practical.  The productivity gains will far outweigh performance hits for the vast majority of situations.  I would agree strongly that ORMs do not generate the most elegant code, but that is a necessary trade-off that needs to be made to get useful functionality.  Remember, just because something does not meet your internal standards for quality doesn’t mean that it isn’t good enough for the customer.  Finally, don’t be afraid to look at different ORMs.  Choosing the wrong ORM can cause problems for the developer and increase costs in the long run.  Choose the right one (or at least an adequate one), though, and your productivity (or your developer’s productivity) should increase significantly.