There's a difference between an ORM and a query builder. Full-blown ORMs often allow you to pretend that all you have are "regular" objects that just happen to

There's a difference between an ORM and a query builder. Full-blown ORMs often allow you to pretend that all you have are "regular" objects that just happen to do database queries when you access them; and that's the kind of ORM that often leads to inefficient database access and fragile code when the program throws an exception when you just wanted to iterate over a list because that iteration actually caused a fetch from a database that happened to have a failover event. With a query builder, you can still use the database in a type-safe way and without gluing strings together, but accessing the database is also more explicit, so mistakes are harder to make. It's fine to represent the result of a database query as a sequence, but its type and interface should be different from that of eg. a list datastructure, because it can fail. similarly, if you have "User" objects representing users, it needs to be explicit which methods fetch data from the database and which use only in-memory properties that code may freely access. Preferably, have different types for "UserInDB" and "User" altogether, with some glue to go between them.