I hit that when working with NHibernate (an early ORM in C# that was a port of Java's Hibernate.) I found that it was easier to write the ^%$#$^ query myself t

I hit that when working with NHibernate (an early ORM in C# that was a port of Java's Hibernate.) I found that it was easier to write the ^%$#$^ query myself than to deal with that monster. What was crazier was that the senior members of the team were so afraid of a database that they couldn't conceive of writing a SQL query. I got stuck on trying to store an enum as an int in a column for about 3 days. Eventually I decided to read the book; and walked away realizing that it was only really useful for extremely complicated schemas. For simple schemas the learning curve was so high that writing boring SQL code was easier / faster. (Now, Microsoft's entity framework is often "good enough" as an ORM, and has a rather gentle learning curve. It helps that C# has a way to express SQL-like queries on a collection of objects and translate them into SQL.)