[ndriscoll]

Not in most modern web application servers. ORMs seem to solve the problem of synchronizing some persistent application state (like a desktop GUI app) to your database state, but web application servers are usually relatively stateless. It's better to think of the application's job as taking a request, parsing it, compiling it to SQL, handing that to a database, and serializing the results.

Through that lens, the parts where you load and save object state are redundant. You're going to throw those objects away after the request anyway. Just take your request and build an UPDATE, etc. Use record types merely as a way to define your schema.