[airstrike]

The correct SQL query will be more performant than what? The correct ORM call will build the same correct SQL query.

ORM is ultimately SQL

[hatefulheart]

So there is no CPU cycles for the ORM itself? That’s free?

[airstrike]

It's 2026. CPU goes brrr. It's absolutely trivial compared to the query execution time.

[sgarland]

Profile your code sometime; I assure you, with a properly indexed query, the actual query time is insignificant compared to everything else, unless your app is Rust, C, Nim, etc.

The overwhelming majority of OLTP queries I see running on massive prod systems execute in < 1 msec. More time is spent in network RTT than execution, let alone the ORM parsing the result.

[nfw2]

1. Network transfer time depends on size of data payload and will basically always dwarf cpu operations unless something is seriously messed up

2. Query performance is dependent on the query and table size. They won't all be < 1msec. Not everything can be an indexed O(1) lookup

3. Generally speaking, network RTT and query performance is going to dwarf time for ORM to parse the result

4. A raw SQL driver ALSO needs to parse the result if you want to do anything with the data in the general purpose language