I'm old enough to remember when pretty much every business app developer knew SQL. ORMs didn't arrive because people didn't want to learn SQL, they arrived beca

I'm old enough to remember when pretty much every business app developer knew SQL. ORMs didn't arrive because people didn't want to learn SQL, they arrived because there was a mismatch between 'relational database' and the emerging trend to 'put your business logic in an OO-powered independent middleware layer'. Unless you want to code all your logic into stored procedures and whatnot, you end up needing some sort of abstraction of the database structure that can manage business rules for you.