[kubota]

I strongly disagree that SQL is broken. Try using JPA or your favorite ORM on a large project with a complex entity graph. It is a nightmare having to ctrl-click deep into the entity graph to see what annotations are on some great-grandchildren to get an idea as to what query is being executed. When working with relational data SQL has always been the ideal tool for the job on the projects I've worked on.

[setr]

ORMs are fundamentally broken. Hiding the relational structure of a relational database is the act of madmen.

Using the psychosis of ORMs to defend the psychosis of SQL is itself a form of psychosis

[xienze]

I think a lot of times people say “ORM” when they mean “Hibernate” or some other ORM implementation.

In your codebase, do you stick raw SQL all over the place and iterate over rows exclusively? Or instead, as a convenience, do you write helpers that map objects into SQL statements and map result rows into objects? If so, congratulations, you’re using an ORM. The concept of ORMs is not bad. It’s a logical thing to do. Some ORM _implementations_ have some very serious issues, but that does not make ORMs as a whole bad.

[setr]

I'm not sure I'd consider query-builders to be ORMs. You do inevitably have a mapping from query resultset to list<obj>, so it does meet the name itself, but there's clearly a very large difference between "Hibernate" and query-builder, and if you don't want to use ORM to be the differentiating term calling out Hibernate and friends specifically, then let me know what you do wish to use. But as far as I know, colloquially and commonly, ORM refers to the former -- not the general act of having any mapping at all.