[radonek]

ORM is not as much solution to a problem as it is way of doing things. Certain kind of programmers observe that SELECT is kinda like getter, UPDATE is like setter and so on… It looks like cool abstraction, relatively straightforward to implement and most people working with databases toy with their own ORM code, have fun and thinks themselves very clever. Think of it as a rite of passage if you will.

…until they try to do JOIN. Or subselect. Or CTE. Or just about any other powerful SQL feature. Materialized views, triggers, sharding, atomic operations, you name it. At which point ones who are actually clever realize this idea has some serious limitations and drop it. Not because it can't be done – there are some nifty and well working ORMS out there – but because its bound to end just as complicated as sql itself. So why bother?

IMO main reason for existence of the ORM libraries is because back in the day, true object databases failed to take off for various reasons.