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More Performance Strategies

ORM is Bad, But is There 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 – using Object-Relational Mappers (ORM).

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. 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.

21 minutes
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Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Database Architect at DRW

Henrietta Dombrovskaya (currently a Database Architect at DRW) is a database researcher and developer with 40 years of academic and industrial experience. Henrietta is very active in the PostgreSQL community. She is a founder of Prairie Postgres NFP, an organization supporting Postgres education in the Midwest states of the US. She regularly talks at the PostgreSQL conferences. Her contributions to the community include the pg_bitemporal project, which supports two-dimensional time in PostgreSQL, postgres_air training database (the largest open-source PostgreSQL training database), and the NORM technology - the novel way of communications between applications and databases. She authored, together with B. Novikov and A. Bailliekova, the book "PostgreSQL Query Optimization," Apress, 2024.