Comments on: Why Active Record Isn’t A Bad Design Pattern

By: bungle

bungle — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:00:54 +0000

Only the best abstractions come with few down sides. Unfortunately Active Record isn’t one of them. Peter Norvig has demonstrated that design patterns are a limitations of the actual programming language.

RoR made Active Record popular, but people still feel it’s a wrong solution. The performance is one of the least important down sides of AR.

By: Bill Karwin

Bill Karwin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:27:06 +0000

The phrase “Rapid Application Development” has two meanings:
1. to develop applications rapidly;
2. to develop rapid applications.

The value of any ORM solution is to improve the first, at the expense of the second.

By: Ivo

Ivo — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:23:26 +0000

It’s not the design pattern that’s the problem, it’s the CHOICE of design pattern. A poorly chosen design pattern can break an application. If you choose ActiveRecord where it’s not a valid solution, it WILL be the problem. Most of the time people complain about a pattern they are not complaining about the pattern per se, but about a particular application’s choice to use said pattern.

By: PHP and MySQL

PHP and MySQL — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:47:07 +0000

I think in MOST cases “slowness” comes because of bad database schema designs, so don’t blame the DB engines, blame yourself or whoever was the architect of the system (-;

By: Brandon Savage

Brandon Savage — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:42:24 +0000

I had meant to include that link in the entry; I guess that’s what happens when you write a blog post on one machine and publish on another. At any rate, thanks for pointing it out; the more people writing on this topic, the better!

By: Eli White

Eli White — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:12:38 +0000

I’ll echo what others have said. Sure, Active Record by it’s nature entails some ‘slowdowns’. But (and this is the performance guy talking), that isn’t always everything. In the end, it’s choosing the right code for your situation. I’m a pragmatist at heart. If using Active Record helps you develop your particular application, cool. Just don’t get so HOOKED on the concept of Active Record that when/if the times comes to gut it out of your code, you can’t.

In general, I believe that’s the case with most ‘design patterns’. They are great ideas to use from time to time. But the problem often comes that people see they have a hammer, and so use the hammer. And that’s where problems lie.

By: Matthew Turland

Matthew Turland — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:00:45 +0000

I agree as well. Don’t blame the saw if you’re trying to use it to drive a nail. This isn’t the first time the topic has been broached on the interwebs, though. ;) http://karwin.blogspot.com/2008/05/activerecord-does-not-suck.html

By: Joe LeBlanc

Joe LeBlanc — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:52:04 +0000

Agreed, most places where I see Active Record being used in Joomla involve inserts or updates, which aren’t going to get much faster if you try to write them by hand.

By: stefan

stefan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:20:16 +0000

Yes. The design pattern is never the problem, it’s the developer that tries to solve a problem with the wrong design pattern that’s to blame. So instead of saying Active Record is wrong, one should say “the use of Active Record in this situation is wrong”.