This is just pure speculation on my part, but: What about optimizations? It seems like it should be possible to construct a SQL query that doesn't hit the pain

This is just pure speculation on my part, but: What about optimizations? It seems like it should be possible to construct a SQL query that doesn't hit the pain points (e.g. avoids queries that do not use indexes). Although from my experiences with other ORM frameworks, that probably isn't an easy problem. Even then though, since it looks like it somewhat aims to replace SQL even in the database-construction step, that might help in this regard, by constructing a more optimal representation of the data (which doesn't seem to be tabular)? Unit testing I am similarly skeptical about though. The article does mention it being "rather esoteric [sounding] at best", I would actually agree with that expression, haha. I don't think I've ever written or even seen, in my 8 years as a developer, a 100-line SQL query that was not at least partly generated (and hence required testing as a unit, and not just the code around it). I suppose Google operates at a different scale, but still.