I think the key difference, at least among most developers I work with, is that ORM has evolved from a complete abstraction of all relational querying, into mor

I think the key difference, at least among most developers I work with, is that ORM has evolved from a complete abstraction of all relational querying, into more of a productivity tool that can be useful in certain circumstances. The differences between something like Hibernate and something like ActiveRecord is pretty vast, at least in terms of usage, and I think one of the key learnings we've made since 2004 is that it's not practical or feasible to treat ORM as a silver bullet. Honestly, no one should be surprised that ORM isn't a silver bullet. NoSQL isn't either - there's plenty of caveats that should be considered before deciding on using NoSQL. I'd still argue that about 80% of database interactions can be solved by a decent ORM. Anything that lets me ignore 80% of my trivial problems and focus on the 20% that's actually challenging is a net win in my book.