> To be clear, I'm not anti-ORM and use them all the time, but it really helps to understand SQL well when using them and to know when it's appropriate to switc

> To be clear, I'm not anti-ORM and use them all the time, but it really helps to understand SQL well when using them and to know when it's appropriate to switch to SQL. When I did web development, I saw it as a "hack" and a "failure to write clean code" whenever I reached for raw SQL. This is of course not true at all, but it was a powerful psychological blocker and I'd spend too much time trying to figure how to get the ORM to do what I wanted instead of writing the SQL myself and moving on to the next problem.