There's some serious miscommunication going on every time this discussion comes up. A lot of people seem to conflate all data abstractions with the term "ORM"

There's some serious miscommunication going on every time this discussion comes up. A lot of people seem to conflate all data abstractions with the term "ORM" (which has a very specific meaning), therefore assuming everyone who thinks ORMs are a bad idea are arguing against all forms of data abstraction. This is not the case. One of the better articles on this: http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern http://seldo.com/weblog/2011/08/11/orm_is_an_antipattern