ORM's have improved considerably over the years, but I've always been a bit hesitant to use them. I've seen a lot of developers begin to believe in the abstrac

ORM's have improved considerably over the years, but I've always been a bit hesitant to use them. I've seen a lot of developers begin to believe in the abstraction, and forget the underlying access. This has caused performance problems with increased round trips to the server, non-obvious indexing strategy issues, and code tightly coupled to the ORM rather than the data. I get especially suspicious with framework-type ORMs that can cause a massive rewrite between major versions. It's costly, time consuming, and doesn't provide any application benefit, it's only new forms of abstraction. ORMs are seductive, because a lot of these issues aren't obvious when you first start using them. The marketing is usually pretty compelling. Unfortunately, by the time you start to run into issues I've described, it's normally too late to change paths.