The question is: is ActiveRecord worse at query generation than other ORMs? My answer is no, it is not. In my experience ORMs are all pretty much equal at thi

The question is: is ActiveRecord worse at query generation than other ORMs? My answer is no, it is not. In my experience ORMs are all pretty much equal at this. (However, I would love to be wrong!) I don't know of any ORM that intelligently analyzes your database and comes up with highly optimized queries. I'm not sure such a thing is possible. The database's own query analyzer can optimize query execution because it has intimate knowledge of the database's own data structures, indexes, data cardinality, etc. I accept ORMs as a necessary evil for most work. However, I enjoy ActiveRecord because unlike some ORMs it makes it fairly easy to simply use raw handwritten SQL when needed.