Okay, I think I get what you're trying to say now. I hate... hate... hate... ORMs where you alter objects and then let the ORM magically persist the changes to

Okay, I think I get what you're trying to say now. I hate... hate... hate... ORMs where you alter objects and then let the ORM magically persist the changes to the database. That is just a level of abstraction that I'm not comfortable with. I think it pushes the developer too far away from the data layer. I still think that the object model does have utility, but like everything, when taken too the logical ends, you end up with ORM managed objects. Instead I've always liked using a Service pattern, where you have data objects that are (largely) immutable. Then you have Service objects that contain the methods that operate on the data objects. I'm just not sure I'd have called it a relational model (hence my confusion).