ORM Adoption in Enterprise Solution?

Question

I have the feeling that ORM is more established and better accepted in the realm of common websites than in Enterprise setting such as banking, or B2B commerce sites. Is my impression correct? If yes, any reason why this is so?

Answer 1

I know plenty of "enterprise" sites that use ORMs. Hibernate is practically the definition of "enterprise".

Answer 2

I think that really depends on the particular business. I would say for major applications this may be true in general until a new big development cycle but that is just because the app or infrastructure has already been developed a certain way and changing it an an arbitrary point is not a trivial task. However it has been my experience that most banking institutions lag behind mainstream because they prefer to go with tried and true proven technologies instead of jumping on bandwagons.

Answer 3

In most enterprise situations, data is the bread and butter of the company. If that data goes bad, people lose jobs. So in most enterprise situations, there's a team dedicated to making sure that the data model is solid, the data is accessed in a limited way, and everything else data-related runs smoothly. These people typically only speak SQL. Hence they prefer to offer a suite of stored procedures for you to consume rather than allow you to do ad-hoc queries against the database.

Change in such situations occurs very slowly, and ORM tools are still a relatively new and (in the eyes of many a data guru) unproven technology. So it's true that in many enterprise situations your data layer may not involve an ORM.

That's not to say that it's a universal truth, however. I've seen some very well oiled ORMs in enterprise shops.

Answer 4

I once interviewed at a firm in NYC that almost exclusively used NHibernate, and their clients were some of the biggest Investment Banks on Wall street. (It's hard not to make jokes no, but you get the point).

So I would say that there are a lot of pretty hardcore places that use NHibernate.