> But I honestly think I'm missing something. Since you confirmed my presumption, I don't think you're missing anything. Put another way, I think you're mostly

> But I honestly think I'm missing something. Since you confirmed my presumption, I don't think you're missing anything. Put another way, I think you're mostly missing the perspective of the typical ORM proponent. From that perspective, even if the datastore isn't necessarily dumb, as such, it's more like an afterthought, conceptually subservient/inferior to the application, perhaps even a necessary evil. The job of the ORM is to release the data from that terrible (relational) paradigm and bring it into enlightened (object) world of whatever language the application is written in. This is, of course, a bit of a caricature for effect. There was a fairly extensive discussion of a database-first paradigm a few weeks ago here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247088 https://blog.jooq.org/2018/06/06/truth-first-or-why-you-should-mostly-implement-database-first-designs/ https://blog.jooq.org/2018/06/06/truth-first-or-why-you-shou... It's worth noting that even that author didn't suggest entirely avoiding an ORM, but, rather, using code-generation (in one that offers it).