[codedokode]

If the query selects a small number of rows and columns, and uses an index, it typically takes less than 1 ms on modern hardware. At least with MySQL.

ORM however might be slow. For example, taking 100 rows from SQLite with SQLAlchemy takes 1ms, but getting them as ORM objects takes 8 ms.

[rob74]

And the ORM is written in... Ruby? So then we are back to "Ruby is slow".

[boxed]

SQLAlchemy is python. Which is slower than Ruby :P

[tomwojcik]

That's apples to oranges. Python is slower, but Sqlalchemy ORM might be able to fetch results faster than Ruby. Though I'd assume the difference would be neglectible.