[fnid]

It's like one people saying "I don't want to use guns, because they are difficult to understand and I can do bad things with them."

Meanwhile, the people who are taking the time to learn about and use guns are dominating the world.

Any developer worth his salt will understand how to do SQL Statements to get back the right dataset or perform the correct updates. Harping on the benefits of an ORM is a bright red flag in my book, because none of them are better than the power, performance, and flexibility of actually understanding SQL. If you concentrate on learning the ORM, then you are learning yourself into a box and won't even know that there are great things outside it if you had only spent the time to learn SQL.

[dortiz]

First of all, you can't do ORM without knowing SQL it's an inherently leaky abstraction and that's not changing anytime soon.

Using SQL is great except what do you define as 'SQL'. Is it MySQL, Oracle or Postgres? How do I migrate between them? Forget data migration, I'm just talking about the data model and constraints. Today I run my app on MySQL but tomorrow the environment will demand Oracle.

I have an app that can run on any database that Hibernate supports with zero code changes and 1 line in a config file including my data constraints.

[fnid]

ANSI SQL and configuration changes everywhere you need them to be flexible.