[andrewingram]

Yeah, my SQL is admittedly rusty due to not hand-writing many queries these days, but my motivation for using an ORM isn't "I can't write SQL", it's that I don't want to be engaging in string building when there are better abstractions available for supporting this kind of operational composition.

The problem with ORMs, as I see it, is that their abstraction is typically too high level and rarely offers you an intermediate layer to let you work around the leaks.

So you often have:

  ORM -> SQL

Which is implemented as:

  ORM -> private query-builder API -> SQL

When what I want is:

  ORM -> public query-builder API -> public SQL-like abstraction -> SQL