[UPHPU] Should I Be Using an ORM?

[Justin Giboney]

To follow up on this question, can these ORMs be installed if you  
don't have access to the full server. For example I have a client that  
setup his host as Host Monster and I don't know if I'll be able to  
install an ORM on it. Doctrine seems to need to be installed as an  
application.

Are there any that don't require full access to the server?

Thanks,

Justin Giboney


On Jul 21, 2009, at 7:10 PM, Justin Hileman wrote:

> Kirk Ouimet wrote:
>> Had a couple questions to post this morning. This one is very open- 
>> ended.
>> I've been looking at PHP ORM's like:
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.doctrine-project.org/
>
>
>
> They're absolutely worth your time to learn. They're super rad, and  
> usually a bit fickle. And, as others have pointed out, they're not  
> the best answer for everything. But they're definitely the best  
> answer for a lot of things.
>
> My team is using Doctrine on a PHP platform with a pretty  
> complicated model, and the ORM makes traversing that model *far*  
> easier. Unfortunately, Doctrine isn't magic. One of my guys threw  
> together a bulk import script that could peg a dual-quad Xeon until  
> PHP timed out and still not finish... We converted the inner loop  
> into a direct SQL insert and the import script could finish in a  
> couple of minutes. So be sure to watch for places you can optimize.
>
> That said, we still use the ORM for almost everything. We have over  
> a hundred model classes in in the project (~150 DB tables) and we  
> have about 18 "normal" SQL queries in the app.
>
> I was curious so I just grepped the source code. Looks like we fall  
> back to SQL in only a couple of cases:
>
> * Bulk import, as mentioned above
>
> * Bulk export/reporting -- although a lot of reporting is done  
> through Doctrine, because it builds all the heinous joins for us :)
>
> * Pagination -- The version of Doctrine we're using has a bug that  
> misreports pagination data... It pages the queries just fine, but  
> lies about how many total rows exist, so we ignore what it tells us  
> and ask directly via SQL.
>
> * And one other place where I'm pretty sure it should have been done  
> in Doctrine. I'll chat with the developer that wrote that code, see  
> if he has a good reason for it :)
>
>
> -- 
> justin
> http://justinhileman.com
>
>
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