It's also the problem of leaky abstractions. Now I need to know a lot about SQL, as well as the ORM, and in particular how the ORM maps to my conceptual model o

It's also the problem of leaky abstractions. Now I need to know a lot about SQL, as well as the ORM, and in particular how the ORM maps to my conceptual model of the underlying SQL. The cognitive load (with some more than others) of this can be extreme. I'm thinking of Hibernate I'm particular. I think there's a good underlying drive for this: type safe, composable, declarative language-centric queries. Especially helpful with bulk data management. I think if SQL was a more natural mapping to this model, it wouldn't be so bad, but SQL was not created for programmatic interaction (it was created to be hand written), and can be challenging to create abstractions around. These days I'll lean on simple ORM-light tools, but quickly prefer an escape hatch when things get even a little complex. Mapping the output is something that I'm happy to delegate to a framework though. Some tools can even provide compile time type checking of your queries, I think that's getting somewhere more interesting.