I've used many ORM's in multiple languages and on multiple teams and have never had a good experience with any of them, once the complexity grew beyond trivial.

I've used many ORM's in multiple languages and on multiple teams and have never had a good experience with any of them, once the complexity grew beyond trivial. I've been tasked with various database optimisation tasks over the years and ORM's have always gotten in my way when it came to understanding a queries indexing and locking and improving/fixing it. I always end up just looking at the logged SQL, fixing it in SQL and then trying to convert it back to ORM code, which has always been tedious. In my experience, in multiple otherwise talented teams, ORM's seem to encourage less-than-ideal database modelling and overfetching data because its too easy to just make an ORM class do it for you rather than really thinking about your data and the data model you need. This isn't ORM's fault of course, but rather the teams using them, but its happened so frequently that I don't think "discipline" or "better developers" is a valid answer. [1] I used to hate databases and dread working with them for the above reasons. I recently started loving databases by working with Clojure and the HugSQL library. The reason I love this approach is that Clojure isn't OO, so there's no Object mapping: I deal with plain old data instead, in whatever format I make the query return it (I can then easily transform that data further if I need) and HugSQL lets me write (composable and parameterised) raw SQL. Its fantastic and has been super productive for me. I can think in pure data and model the database how it makes sense and still have a good understanding of the indexing and locking of my queries. [1] As jandrewrogers said: "in almost every place I've seen them used they've become a way for developers to avoid understanding how databases work, inevitably leading to inexplicable data models and poor performance. In practice, ORMs tend to end up creating crippling technical debt" and this has been my experience too. Sure, you can use an ORM well, but in reality, this seems to happen so rarely that in my opinion, ORM's are a net negative to be avoided if possible. Saying that you just gotta use them right (when few people seem to actually do so) seems like a bit of a no true scotsman argument to me.