The Daily WTF

Object-Relational-Mappers (ORMs) are a subject of pain, pleasure, and flamewars. On one hand, they make it trivially easy to write basic persistence logic, as long as it stays basic. But they do this by concealing the broader powers of relational databases, which means that an ORM is a leaky abstraction. Used incautiously or inappropriately, and they stop making your life easy, and make it much, much harder.

That’s bad, unless you’re Tenesha’s co-worker, because you apparently want to suffer.

In addition to new products, Tenesha’s team works on a legacy Ruby-on-Rails application. It’s an ecommerce tool, and thus it handles everything from inventory to order management to billing to taxes.

Taxes can get tricky. Each country may have national tax rates. Individual cities may have different ones. In their database, they have a TaxesRate table which tracks the country name, the city name, the region code name, and the tax

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