Labeling an ORM as an anti-pattern is throwing the baby away with the bathwater. Sure, you will encounter some cases in which your ORM will be a pain in the ass

Labeling an ORM as an anti-pattern is throwing the baby away with the bathwater. Sure, you will encounter some cases in which your ORM will be a pain in the ass or even actively work against you, but most good ORM's will allow you to talk to the database directly. For example, both Hibernate and ActiveRecord allow you to just throw straight sql to your database, returning a bunch of key value data. Which is exactly what a good solution does: provide large gains for the common cases, and get out of the way for the edge case.