I’m working on a little side project at the moment (a PHP web app), and have decided to not use an ORM. It’s so great to be writing SQL again! Things are much faster to build and simpler to reason about. I know I could do everything I’m doing with the ORM, but I always get confused about how things are “supposed” to be done, and with straight SQL (or nearly straight: I’m using Doctrine’s DBAL which has lots of useful things like insert() etc.) I can just write what’s required. The query log is so much cleaner, and every query in it is meant to be there. Maybe I’m pushing too much filtering and ordering etc. to the database, but it does feel like that’s where it belongs. Why am I feeling defensive?! :-) Maybe I’m just another old-school PHP developer now, nostalgic for 2005.

I’m feeling thoroughly annoyed with the ORM system I’m using in Symfony. All I want to do is merge tags! It should be a matter of an update statement, followed by a delete. But with Doctrine ORM I have to all sorts of confusing things (well, not that confusing, it has to be said, but still…). So I think I might just go back to the simple days when things made sense and database statements behaved properly (i.e. ran when and how you thought they would within a transaction).