I think things have very much moved away from the "one vs. the other" stance. Back in the late 90's, I think people really did think that they could spend time

I think things have very much moved away from the "one vs. the other" stance. Back in the late 90's, I think people really did think that they could spend time on an ORM tool and never have to think about the database. In my own work, the ORM is there for lots of boring stuff, like fetch the data and push it into an edit form and then push the contents of the edit form back into the database. When it comes to q query of any consequence I end up writing SQL and then presenting a data set to the ORM, something that it can understand. Maybe it's my age, but I'm still not a big stored procedure guy. But you look at some of the interesting things you can do with SQL, it seems silly to try and interact with it only through someone else's ORM tool.