> they help abstract the database technology If you are going to do anything even remotely complex you're going to need to know that database technology otherw

> they help abstract the database technology If you are going to do anything even remotely complex you're going to need to know that database technology otherwise your ORM is going to spit out queries that are dead stupid and a performance nightmare (pages taking 1 full minute to load). Then you end up fighting with the ORM to do what you want. That's my experience. I guess there are projects that are so simple the database layer can be abstracted away but I've never worked on one.