I’ve been writing a lot of database access code as of late. It’s frustrating that in 2023, my choices are still to either write all of the boilerplate by hand, or hand all database access over to some inscrutable “agile” ORM that will become a crippling liability in the 2-3y timescale. This post is about how I want to use databases, from the perspective of an application server developer—not a DBA