Dr. ORM or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Database changes

There was a time when database refactoring would set up the project alarm, and everybody would worry about stopping for a day or two. ORMs somehow help us here. But not only when refactoring, also on changes. Let me tell you about it.

We've been working on a database that was modeled by others, and just discovered (late on the project) that some of the foreign keys didn't point to primary but to alternate keys. The problem here is not about the modeling itself - it's not greenfield so it's out of our hands. The problem is that all the queries that joined these tables would have to be rewritten.

And here's what's great about ORMs: we only had to change one reference on the mapper.

NHibernate: 1 - silly way to model databases: 0