[happyflower]

ORMs give an affordability to write code faster. That may save time, but instead of saving time, you can also reinvest in better quality and performance. That's up to you and your team.

For instance, Django has prefetch_related and select_related. At almost every Django conference, there's a talk on this topic because it's so important and very underused/overlooked. But these are provided methods of the ORM.

Aside from that, there are wonderful introspection tools such as django-debug-toolbar to view the raw SQL and its performance.

It can be argued that if a solution written in Django hasn't had its database performance introspected with for instance django-debug-toolbar, then the solution isn't done. This is a small step with big rewards.

This introspection can easily identify where raw SQL is useful. But apply it late in process: As a project matures, the costs of converting some queries into raw/hybrid SQL are lower, as the statement is less likely to change. But keep these SQL statements in the models and managers, don't let them spill into views, template tags etc.