[grangerg]

It depends on what you're after.

I'm very comfortable in SQL, and would prefer to write my queries. But our team has grown, and we've found that developers say they know SQL, but they really don't. In general, I've found that it's not the syntax that messes people up. There's a significant mental "jump" between the usual procedural coding paradigm and the "set based" paradigm offered by SQL. Some people just never catch on.

So we're going to start using an ORM (Entity Framework Core 2) so that the "mere mortal" developers can pitch in. I know there's a way to run raw SQL, so I know that when we find spots where the ORM fails, we can just rewrite it with some good SQL if we decide that's best.

But maybe that'll never happen? We've been trying to do simpler SQL stuff as of late so that the heavier lifting in the system is done by the application/client instead of the database (bottleneck). As the database sees simpler, less unique queries, more stay in the plan cache, indexes are more reliably hit as expected, and performance increases.