I think you might be confusing 2 different ideas. An ORM is an Object Relational Mapper. Lots of companies build very big software without using an ORM. And the

I think you might be confusing 2 different ideas. An ORM is an Object Relational Mapper. Lots of companies build very big software without using an ORM. And the very concept of an ORM becomes meaningless if you use a language that rejects Object Oriented Programming. For instance, when using Clojure, some teams use Korma: http://sqlkorma.com/ http://sqlkorma.com/ Korma is a DSL. And I think you are confusing the concepts of ORM and DSL. I'd agree that most teams, over time, tend to develop (or borrow) their own DSLs for interacting with the database. And I've seen teams that use the term DSL loosely to refer to any code they write to interact with the database, so long as they are doing more than concatenating strings of SQL. But they don't necessarily use ORMs.