The thing I always disliked about ActiveRecord ORMs is that you need to learn "their way" of writing SQL too much Yeah. I see people straining to write co

The thing I always disliked about ActiveRecord ORMs is that you need to learn "their way" of writing SQL too much Yeah. I see people straining to write complex queries in their ORM and I think it's just insane. At some point you're going to have to understand and debug the generated SQL anyway. I think Rails' ActiveRecord implementation is pretty ideal because one of the explicit goals was to get out of the developer's way and allow them to write raw SQL when needed. I don't know how well other ActiveRecord implementations fare with this. I created PluSQL, a non-ActiveRecord ORM because I prefer to write SQL Cool! I'm not a PHP dev but it looks neat. Even though I just defended ActiveRecord, I kind of miss the days of thinner data mappers / ORMs.