I agree. Clean and efficient abstractions (oxymoron?) to handle data management just doesn't exist. ORMs are great until they're not, at which point you do need

I agree. Clean and efficient abstractions (oxymoron?) to handle data management just doesn't exist. ORMs are great until they're not, at which point you do need to understand SQL and idiosyncrasies of the underlying relational database. I tend to prefer avoiding ORMs as a preference because of this but unfortunately, development expectations in the current culture don't pad time enough to do this, so you're often reliant on an ORM and wait until things break before someone paying the bills will be swayed to allow developers to go in and clean things up. The "wait until it breaks to go fix and redesign everything" mentality isn't unique to ORMs though, it plagues any abstraction, framework, library, whatever that gets enough done to supply something mostly functional in a shorter time scale.