[hot_gril]

If you can avoid learning SQL or the underlying DBMS then great, I have no problem with people ignoring things that are ignore-able. Problem is you can't. You will need to learn the DBMS, and the ORM will end up just getting in the way of what you really want to do.

[DangitBobby]

I've used ORMs extensively in my career, and I've seen it trotted out as a Boogeyman here a million times. Why do I still prefer writing queries with a good ORM over awkwardly composing SQL by conditionally concatenating strings? Is buggy, error prone string concatenation with a bunch of if statements the true way? What am I missing?

[hot_gril]

Conditional concat should be pretty rare. When are you doing that?

[DangitBobby]

When I need a new where clause or a new order by, or I have to stop using an IN filter because you can't use an empty tuple. Stuff like that.

[hot_gril]

Yeah, if you're going to conditionally add filters, this is mostly the only way with SQL. There are a few tricks depending on the dialect, like =ANY() is more convenient than IN, or COALESCE can avoid some dynamic WHEREs.

You're not really missing anything other than query builders, which are worse for other reasons.