[Aqueous]

The last query I wrote had 6 or 7 joins in it, a union, and calculated the frequency of answer responses for a worldwide survey (tens of thousands of respondents) in 0.04 seconds with a 1 million row table. You can accomplish an awful lot of business logic in a single SQL query, which makes SQL tremendously useful thing to know. On the other hand it is tedious to tweak an object mapper call to give you the result that you want that efficiently.

This is useful for abstracting away some routine SQL queries, but I think people think simple selects and inserts are more routine than they are actually are.. If you structure your data layer in a way that takes advantage of the power of the RDMBS I find that the only query here is truly routine is insertion on a single row...

We already have a language for expressing relational database queries - SQL. Every time you abstract away this language you risk reducing its expressiveness.