Question about the benefit of using an ORM

Posted by johnny on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by johnny
Published on 2009-04-17T15:15:29Z Indexed on 2010/04/19 23:23 UTC
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best-practices

I want to use an ORM for learning purposes and am try nhibernate. I am using the tutorial and then I have a real project. I can go the "old way" or use an ORM. I'm not sure I totally understand the benefit. On the one hand I can create my abstractions in code such that I can change my databases and be database independent. On the other it seems that if I actually change the database columns I have to change all my code.

Why wouldn't I have my application without the ORM, change my database and change my code, instead of changing my database, orm, and code? Is it that they database structure doesn't change that much?

I believe there are real benefits because ORMs are used by so many. I'm just not sure I get it yet.

Thank you.

EDIT: In the tutorial they have many files that are used to make the ORM work

http://www.hibernate.org/362.html

In the event of an application change, it seems like a lot of extra work just to say that I have "proper" abstraction layers. Because I'm new at it it doesn't look that easy to maintain and again seems like extra work, not less.

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