[aantix]

>For some things, an abstraction suffices, but it's far from a universal solution

Fair, but the ORM covers 80% of what you need. Mapping to objects, autoloading associations. These are simple selects and joins and make up a large portion of most information based systems.

When something needs performance and the ORM isn't optimizing appropriately, sure, drop to raw SQL and optimize away. Even then, what did you gain? Shaving 100 seconds off a 200 second query, sure that's worth it. But if you optimize and manage to shave off a mere five seconds, was it worth it? Maybe. Maybe not.

For most systems where you're displaying information, you just need good enough, an ORM that feels productive and doesn't get in the way (e.g. ActiveRecord).

[tyre]

I agree with everything except the five seconds note. Web pages loading in fives seconds is an awful experience.

Optimizing expensive queries not only improves the user experience (be it web or api or whatever) but also can open up entire usecases that otherwise wouldn’t be practical. Five second queries are a primate candidate for DOS attacks, whether intentionally malicious or by users spamming refresh, retry, etc.

[Izkata]

I think he meant shaving only 5 seconds off of the 200 second query.

[nicoburns]

Maybe, but shaving almost 5 seconds off a 5 second query can be quite realistic for some pathological ORM queries. I use ORMs for the simple cases, but it's definitely worth cutting them out in the complex ones.