The real trick is to have a deep understanding of SQL before you use an ORM so that you know exactly what you are asking the ORM to ask the database to do. Oth

The real trick is to have a deep understanding of SQL before you use an ORM so that you know exactly what you are asking the ORM to ask the database to do. Otherwise you will never be able to really understand what is going on and will not be able to optimize a complex app that needs to be performant at scale. Learning both has its advantages and I think an ORM can indeed speed up development, most especially for the prototyping phase.