I found the article very hard to follow. Then I read the domain name and it all made sense...
Guess our pattern is different, not really felt the pain point the author is talking about. Or it's the language/framework, not sure whatever the example code is written in, but setting properties on entity records would never update the database in the ones I've used.
When we did things more manually we'd make sure that methods like `create_main_records` would start a transaction if not in one, and only commit if it started the transaction. This way we could nest without worry. Our database supported nested transactions but using this pattern we didn't feel the need.
Tired: pass live DB model objects around, mutate them to accumulate random changes, call commit() five levels deep, experience the chaos as described by the author.
Wired: fetch DB records and construct domain objects, pass them around, do mutation on the outermost level within an explicit transaction. (Typical best practice.)
This is like people saying that C is infallible and it’s those stupid lesser-developers that unlike me simply cannot wield its immense power.
No. Usability matters. After all these years software development still has an ‘unfounded male confidence / posturing’ problem and it’s just cringeworthy
I agree. No matter how complicated, or unnecessary, or unintuitive a piece of software or technology is... There is always this contingent of people who pop in and say "It is not that hard!" and furthermore tend to express a view of "I am superior because I figured out this obtuse thing, and you must be inferior because you have not figured it out".
I do not know why that mentality exists in the industry, but I see it all the time... for the past 35 years.
Database engines I've worked with generally support nested transactions, so you can open a transaction, open another transaction, commit it, then roll back the outer transaction... and it's like nothing ever happened.
This ability to compose transactions is their main benefit over other kinds of concurrency control!
For those that don't, it's almost always modeled in the connection-library as "hold it open until commits == opens, or roll back if any roll back". Or it's often easy to build this yourself, around the library.
Which works entirely fine in most cases. You're at greater risk of phantom reads and general "stuff that can occur while you hold open a transaction", but if you're not handling that correctly then you're not handling that correctly. It's only a matter of volume, not existence.
... with a clear exception for cases where you do need to truly end a transaction, like if you're relying on some other thread to do something on a different transaction that needs to see your changes, or when you risk a deadlock somewhere due to not releasing your lock. Those are both a risky patterns for a lot of reasons though, and worth avoiding at design-time if at all possible.
Feel like I've solved this non problem like 20 times.
If your framework is holding your records in a collection and you keep track of phantoms that have been edited but not saved as they are edited then all this becomes a non issue. That way you do Collection->SaveTransaction or Collection->Save() and the collection does all the db commit, roll back nonsense.
Anyway the examples I don't even know if I could call that an ORM. Use a better one.
Show, don't tell. The article should've included an example of these helpers.
All in all, this feels poorly written, but also poorly thought out. The DB layer can and should throw an exception if you manually begin/commit inside a context manager. Please do blame it if it doesn't.
Guess our pattern is different, not really felt the pain point the author is talking about. Or it's the language/framework, not sure whatever the example code is written in, but setting properties on entity records would never update the database in the ones I've used.
When we did things more manually we'd make sure that methods like `create_main_records` would start a transaction if not in one, and only commit if it started the transaction. This way we could nest without worry. Our database supported nested transactions but using this pattern we didn't feel the need.
Wired: fetch DB records and construct domain objects, pass them around, do mutation on the outermost level within an explicit transaction. (Typical best practice.)
Inspired: "functional core, imperative shell".
Why not? Why should I be allowed to db.commit() midway through a transaction?
I do not know why that mentality exists in the industry, but I see it all the time... for the past 35 years.
This ability to compose transactions is their main benefit over other kinds of concurrency control!
Which works entirely fine in most cases. You're at greater risk of phantom reads and general "stuff that can occur while you hold open a transaction", but if you're not handling that correctly then you're not handling that correctly. It's only a matter of volume, not existence.
... with a clear exception for cases where you do need to truly end a transaction, like if you're relying on some other thread to do something on a different transaction that needs to see your changes, or when you risk a deadlock somewhere due to not releasing your lock. Those are both a risky patterns for a lot of reasons though, and worth avoiding at design-time if at all possible.
I think the option should be there, but it needs to be used responsibly.
If your framework is holding your records in a collection and you keep track of phantoms that have been edited but not saved as they are edited then all this becomes a non issue. That way you do Collection->SaveTransaction or Collection->Save() and the collection does all the db commit, roll back nonsense.
Anyway the examples I don't even know if I could call that an ORM. Use a better one.
Show, don't tell. The article should've included an example of these helpers.
All in all, this feels poorly written, but also poorly thought out. The DB layer can and should throw an exception if you manually begin/commit inside a context manager. Please do blame it if it doesn't.