I think the point is if you move that denormalisation to the application (the ORM say) then it's less data on the wire. Similarly keeping schema information gi

I think the point is if you move that denormalisation to the application (the ORM say) then it's less data on the wire. Similarly keeping schema information gives the ORM more to work with I suppose? Helpful for typing, foreign key links where it's not necessarily the same original table structure, but in the query result professor_id is still ultimately a foreign key to professor table, etc.