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Comment by ergo14 | Hacker News Reader

"Django has in many ways become the industry standard in regards to fast development - but it, as so many other ORMs, does not scale and produces horrible SQL-statements."

I disagree - many ORM's in python world? Try using sqlalchemy it will put django's ORM to shame, it will build fast good looking queries most of time, and if you have a rare case of something not good enough - you can easly tweak it. Can't say anything about Storm but saying that "industry standard" django ORM is OK because "others have same flaws" is just distorting reality to fit this thesis ;-) Ugly truth is django ORM is not ok and it bites many people when they are at the point where it's real pain to fix this - the more developers are aware of this the better.

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I'm in the process of building an api in Django (GeoDjango, actually, with PostGIS). What are the gripes with the ORM and how could it be better? (Not that I'm disagreeing; I'm curious. I'm not experienced enough to know what makes an ORM okay or not.)

Theres a couple of issues i had with it personally. It doesnt work that well with nosql. Also i found it difficult to customize or do certain things that i wanted to do. Some of them very basic. For example i wanted to only return individual columns rather then all of them. I spent hours looking for how to do this. I finally found out you do .values or .select or something to that effect at the end of your call. Unfortunately i tried this and got errors. So i gave up in frustration.

.defer() and .only(), they're right in the list of methods on Querysets: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/models/querysets/#.... Sorry, but it's a bit hard to take this critique seriously, given how trivial it is. I have a list of complaints about Django's ORM that is about a mile long, so don't think I'll defend it blindly, but let's try to stay grounded in reality when we criticize something.

No idea what defers and only are. Actually maybe only was what i was looking for. The django documentation for many things such as this is almost non existent. Some of it is from older versions as well. And im sorry but how is a newbie supposed to find this stuff. Youve probably been working with python and django for a while. Which is great. But when youre just starting and playing around having to spend hours looking simplistic stuff like this up when you have a million other things to do really gets frustrating.

None of your points are coherent or truthful. This seems common among people that run to Node and Mongo.

> The django documentation for many things such as this is almost non existent.

He just linked you to documentation with exactly what you needed, so it surely exists.

> Some of it is from older versions as well.

He linked to the current 1.3 docs.

> And im sorry but how is a newbie supposed to find this stuff.

The second section of the docs is about models, the second heading is all about QuerySets. The link he pasted is literally right in front of you.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/

QuerySets: Executing queries | QuerySet method reference

That mile-long list of complaints is what I'm after. Not to compel you to write a book about it (but if you did, I'd read it :-P), but what are some of those things?

Geo guys learn Django for GeoDjango. I'll try to find the article, but that part of Django is really, really great.

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