On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Paul M Foster <paulf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote: > I agree. My advice for SQL is always to learn SQL rather than use a > bunch of active record functionality. But I'm sure people think I'm just > a curmudgeonly old turd. ;-} > Yes, absolutely learn SQL so you understand what's happening under the covers, AND then use a framework to abstract much of it away. I cannot speak to ActiveRecord, but ORM frameworks like Hibernate in the Java world save countless man-hours of work every day, time that can be spent on making better applications. On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 7:14 AM, Tommy Pham <tommyhp2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The only need I see for this is to build the query dynamically... > which should be very rare since all those function calls are > expensive, IMO. > Function calls haven't been expensive since 1992. ;) The cost of running the SQL query itself will dwarf any function calls made to build the query. The gains in developer productivity vastly outweigh the small gains to be had by micro-optimizing away function calls and other abstractions, and developer time is much more expensive than CPU time. Start with code that is easy to understand, write, and debug. Measure the performance if it is too slow, find the slow parts using a profiler, and optimize them. Nine times out of ten you can gain more by changing your algorithm than by removing function calls. David
