Active Records Performance vs Raw Queries

@Narf

No, it is not just "nice". I've seen tons of unescaped raw SQL, I knew people that just did not care about that. The query builder at least gives escaping automatically, this is important.

Yea, and that's "nice" in the same sense that IDEs will do auto-completion for you, while plain-text editors won't. It's not a fair comparison to assume that you won't do escaping if you write raw SQL.
That you actually need to know what you're doing doesn't make one solution better than the other.

For someone like me, a self taught coder, SQL has always been a hurdle. I am sure if I dedicated some time (probably quite a bit) I could get good with it, but I don't really want to in all honesty. I have built some fairly complex sites to date including e-commerce, community and download sites, but have rarely had to delve into SQL directly. The query builder lets me build relatively complex queries with only a very basic working knowledge of SQL.

So personally, I love the CI query builder. For me it is one of the really great core aspects of CI.

But I suppose that just puts me firmly in the camp of "it's nice", but 'nice' doesn't seem to give it the importance I think it deserves.

Paul.

PS I have never used anything other than MySql so this opinion is nothing more than a non-expert's opinion with very limited knowledge and experience.

All QB methods (in CodeIgniter) are named and designed after SQL keywords, so if you know how to use the query builder, you should know how to write the equivalent SQL code.