Introduction to ORM
Explore the fundamentals of Object Relational Mappers and how they bridge JavaScript objects and SQL databases. Learn the benefits of using ORMs like unified codebases, enhanced security, and flexibility across different SQL systems. Understand why TypeScript is preferred for ORM usage, improving data type safety in Node.js applications.
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Overview of ORMs
An ORM is a programming technique that enables us to write queries and manipulate an SQL database using object-oriented techniques without writing SQL code directly. With ORMs, data is converted between two incompatible type systems. ORMs convert simple objects or JSON files as we see in JavaScript, into SQL queries, data types, and simple values that are compatible with SQL. ORMs also generate the logic to retrieve the data, types, and simple values that are very compatible with SQL.
Why ORMs?
ORMs make it easy for a JavaScript developer to work with SQL databases.
Some of their core benefits are:
- Unified codebases: With an ORM, the development language doesn’t change to interact with the database since the ORM provides database abstraction. We only write code in our preferred language, and the ORM handles the interaction with the SQL database.
- Advanced features: ORMs provide advanced SQL features that may be difficult to implement directly or may require a lot of expertise, but also greatly improve the functionality of the database. Some of those features include connection pooling, migrations, database seeding, and transactions.
- Security: ORMs provide security against some of the major threats when working with SQL databases (for example, SQL injection). That’s because they filter each instruction or query. They also present a strict and properly engineered structure when interacting with the database.
- Flexibility: There are many different SQL databases out there with some differences in query syntax such as MySQL, Postgres, MSSSQL, and so on. An ORM gives developers leverage because they don’t have to learn the query syntaxes for these databases. We just write code only in our preferred language, and it handles all the database interaction.
ORMs for TypeScript
ORMs have made the development experience very exciting, easy, and productive. TypeScript is emerging as a choice for most developers when building complex JavaScript applications. TypeScript ensures that we provide a data type definition for our libraries, variables, classes, and functions. This solves the “loosely typed language” problem of JavaScript.
Working with ORMs using TypeScript may grow stressful and our code may become bulky as we write numerous type definitions, even for things that may not be part of our application core. This is one of the reasons we select from recommended ORMs when using TypeScript as the development language.