I've been using NHibernate + Castle ActiveRecord for a few small/medium projects over the past year, and I find that it significantly speeds up my development p

I've been using NHibernate + Castle ActiveRecord for a few small/medium projects over the past year, and I find that it significantly speeds up my development process. My object model may be "contaminated" now, but if I'm getting my work done that much faster (plus the added benefit of database vendor independence), I don't really see the downside. Perhaps if you have a really complex database model, that's one thing...but in most cases, it's not. Would people do things differently if there were an adhered-to SQL standard? Probably not, since using an ORM still saves you development time since you don't need to write a bunch of fairly routine code. A better solution might be to have a code-generation tool that writes the code by hand but doesn't ruin your business object model.