> The reason is that sure, for your first 10 basic select queries, the ORM saved you half an hour Maybe we work in very different fields, but "basic select que

> The reason is that sure, for your first 10 basic select queries, the ORM saved you half an hour Maybe we work in very different fields, but "basic select queries" makes up 90% of what I need to fetch from the database. If I'm working on a forum and I want to load user 123, with all their posts, all the awards each post has, and the count of friends the user has, with Eloquent (Laravel's ORM), I could do: `User::with('posts.awards')->withCount('friends')->findOrFail(123);` That would return me a User model, with a collection "posts" containing a list of Post models, each with a collection "awards" of Award models, and a field `friends_count` with the number of friends. It would run three queries: one to fetch the user, one to fetch the posts, and one to fetch the awards. Depending on how I have configured my models, I can have things like dates automatically hydrated to DateTime objects. Compare that to plain SQL queries; I would have to fetch the users, including manually writing the subquery for the friend count. Once I had those users I would then have to fetch the posts, and then again for the awards. If I want them in a hierarchy like the ORM example gives me, I then need to loop through each set of records and manually stitch them together. Not difficult, but super tedious. Sure a complicated join is better done with as little magic as possible, but Eloquent exposes functions for adding subselects, joins, etc. in a way that just reads like SQL (and maps 1:1 underneath).