Indeed, my introduction to databases was extracting stuff using Perl's DBI and getting good at pushing the work out to the DB. When I was introduced to ORMs it

Indeed, my introduction to databases was extracting stuff using Perl's DBI and getting good at pushing the work out to the DB. When I was introduced to ORMs it was instantly clear that they were a game changer for MVC development. I've transitioned a few legacy (large) Rails applications through Arel and often did not understand why we were putting the work in, other than to make it easier on new/future developers who did not understand SQL. In pretty much all of them we ended up having to keep some non-Arel queries -- you know, the ones where `STRAIGHT_JOIN` cuts 5 minutes off a query!