If you're working with Go services that talk to a relational database, chances are you've bumped into GORM. It's the most widely used ORM in the Go ecosystem, and for good reason. It wraps a lot of the tedium of database/sql ,manual scanning, hand-written migrations, string-built queries in a much friendlier API.
This article walks through GORM from setup to the patterns you'll actually use day to day: models, migrations, CRUD, associations, transactions, and a few gotchas that trip people up.
Why reach for an ORM in Go ?
Go's standard database/sql package is deliberately low-level. You write SQL strings, manually scan rows into structs, and manage connections yourself. That's fine for small projects, but it gets repetitive fast once you have a dozen tables and endpoints that all need similar create/read/update/delete logic.
GORM sits on top of database/sql and gives you:
