What the Django's ORM Author Hates About It

Alex Gaynor, a Django core committer and author of much of the object-relational mapping (ORM) code, gave a presentation on what he hates about the mapping layer. Every ORM layer in existence has issues, especially for edge cases, but Django's has been criticized lately for various reasons. Alex's presentation addresses concerns are in three areas of the ORM layer:

1. Inconsistencies in querying syntax are confusing and were built up without an overall strategy over time

2. Complex queries are virtually impossible with the existing syntax, especially compared to SQLAlchemy

3. Aggregation queries take strings instead of objects, which is inconsistent with other query types and limits the aggregation queries' usefulness

Alex's point during the presentation is to bring up the most glaring issues, show why they need to be fixed in future Django releases, and move the Django ORM from an "80/20" solution closer to a "90/10" solution that is easier to apply across a broader set of use cases.

Slides: Why I hate the Django ORM (Speaker Deck)