ORMs leak abstractions? Yes. ORMs are an anti-pattern? Thats a little hard to swallow. As many people have pointed out on this thread, I use ORMs as just a tool

ORMs leak abstractions? Yes. ORMs are an anti-pattern? Thats a little hard to swallow. As many people have pointed out on this thread, I use ORMs as just a tool to avoid writing the darned boilerplate code. As many times I have started writing simple code to abstract the boilerplate, I inevitably endup writing a half-baked ORM tool, at which point, I throw it and just use an existing one. The key advantage for me is not that it abstracts SQL, it does not do it at all, but that it abstract so many other unimportant details that I must solve to fix the "impedance mismatch" between two different systems - an OO language and a relational system. I use an ORM to do just that.