I prefer ORMs to writing raw SQL in application logic - and that is not due to lack of experience with either. (I notice your criticism is mostly ad-hominems di

I prefer ORMs to writing raw SQL in application logic - and that is not due to lack of experience with either. (I notice your criticism is mostly ad-hominems directed against people using ORM's rather than actual criticism of the technology.) Note that SQL is also a leaky abstraction over the relational operations - it is just a question of which abstraction is most useful for a particular purpose. Linq express the relational operations just as directly as SQL does, and with a less clunky and more composable syntax. If you are optimizing raw SQL for performance then you are breaking the SQL abstraction anyway. SQL is supposed to work on a logical level, and the query optimizer do the rest. I know it is sometimes necessary anyway, but that does not show a weakness in the ORM abstraction, it shows a weakness in the query optimizer.