[thedudemabry]

I totally agree. Mr. Fowler's article lays out a good case for ORMs being a good, leaky abstraction with manholes for diving deeper when necessary. That implies that we can't, as application developers, use it as a black box, because underlying knowledge is important. Until someone comes up with a magic algebra for paving over the details SQL, we're stuck mitigating or dealing with its realities.

One of the things I've recently prioritized is the ability to run arbitrary queries (generally read-only) at some sort of REPL prompt, for debugging and investigative purposes. ORMs and their offshoots offer a great deal of support in that area because you can converse with an ORM in a domain-specific way without dropping into raw SQL. That can be a big advantage.