Биография

Henrietta Dombrovskaya is a database researcher and developer with over 35 years of academic and industrial experience. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saint Petersburg, Russia. At present she is

— Senior Cloud Consultant at Enterprise DB
— Local Organizer of the Chicago PostgreSQL User Group
— Active community member, a frequent speaker at the PostgreSQL Conferences
— A researcher focused on developing efficient interactions between applications and databases; publications include Proceedings of EDBT 2014 Athens, ICDE 2016 in Helsinki, and SOFSEM 2020 Limassol
— A winner of the “Technologist of the Year” 2019 award of the Illinois Technology Association
— An author of PostgreSQL Query Optimization book

Доклад

We Know ORMs Are Bad. Can We Offer an Alternative?

It’s a well-known fact, that although the database performance is great, and each query is executed in milliseconds, the overall application response time may be slow, making the users wait for a response for extended periods of time. The problem is not the database, but the way the application developers communicate with the database. Specifically, we are talking about ORMs — Object-Relational Mappers. Database developers hate them, but application developers love them because they allow developing applications without any knowledge of database internals. As a result, the system performance is often unacceptably slow.

The only way to change this behavior is to provide application developers with a tool, which is as easy to use, as an ORM, but which will allow escaping the common ORM pitfalls. That’s why we developed NORM — No-ORM Framework. This approach became very popular with application developers with only one caveat — writing PostgreSQL functions and stored procedures requires a level of expertise above the typical application developer’s level. To facilitate the adoption of the No-ORM approach, we developed a set of generators of user-defined types and functions. The input data is presented in a form of annotated JSON schema, which makes them easy to use by both database and application developers.

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