I think the ORM is Djangos strongest point. Take the ORM away and then ModelForms and Admin go with it. I think Django makes little sense if you're not using th

I think the ORM is Djangos strongest point. Take the ORM away and then ModelForms and Admin go with it. I think Django makes little sense if you're not using the ORM. That said, you're absolutely right that it is really bad at certain types of queries. There's no way to really influence joins. Subqueries are coming (https://github.com/django/django/pull/6478 https://github.com/django/django/pull/6478), and conditional aggregates became possible in Django 1.8 with Expressions support (which I authored). Queries that map over many to many relations that have .exclude() or .annotate() generally produce incorrect results. Most of the problems with the ORM are as a result of Django handling joins for the user - which is also one of its biggest strengths. You should absolutely know SQL if you're using an ORM. If you're doing anything other than basic CRUD, you have to know SQL. An ORM should give you an escape hatch to write that custom SQL. Django's ORM does not save you from all the problems mentioned in the article.