Django ORM - My History

I'm not the best SQL developer, I know it's one of my weak points. My history is I did php/mysql from the early 2000s until college. In college I didn't really focus on the Database courses, the class selection didn't have many database course. The one Data Warehousing course I had available, I missed out on because I was in England doing a study abroad program that semester. My first job out of college was a Python/Django company - and that directed my next eight years of work.

Django, if you are unaware, is a MVC framework that ships with a really great ORM. You can do about 95% of your database queries automatically by using the ORM.

entry, created = Entry.objects.get_or_create(headline="blah blah blah")

q = Entry.objects.filter(headline__startswith="What")
q = q.filter(pub_date__lte=datetime.date.today())
q = q.exclude(body_text__icontains="food")

Above are some samples from the DjangoDocs. But enough about Django.

My Requirements

Recently at my job I was given a little bit of leeway on a project. My team is sort of dissolving and merging in with another team who already does Go. My Go history is building a CLI tool for the two last years of my previous job. I had never directly interacted with a database from Go yet. I wanted to spin up a REST API (I chose Go+Gin for that based on forty five seconds of Googling) and talk to a database.

GORM

Being that I come from the Django (and a few years of ActiveRecord) land, I reached immediately for an ORM, I chose GORM. If you want to skip directly to the source, check out https://gitea.tyrel.dev/tyrel/go-webservice-gin. Full design disclosure: I followed a couple of blog posts in order to develop this, so it is in the form explictly decided upon by the logrocket blog post and may not be the most efficient way to organize the module.

In order to instantiate a model definition, it's pretty easy. What I did is make a new package called models and inside made a file for my Album.

type Album struct {
      ID     string  `json:"id" gorm:"primary_key"`
      Title  string  `json:"title"`
      Artist string  `json:"artist"`
      Price  float64 `json:"price"`
}

This tracks with how I would do the same for any other kind of struct in Go, so this wasn't too …