If you're happy with your ORM (and, ahem, your users are happy with your app's speed), then you can disregard this post.<p>An ORM is an abstraction over what already is a huge abstraction, which is SQL. Therefore it would feel to me like driving a bus by remote control, or something like that.<p>SQL isn't a procedural language, like C, Fortran, Cobol, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc. It is a "query language", I guess, where you tell it <i>what</i> you want, and it decides <i>how</i> it's actually going to find, filter, sort, etc., that data. It's also the only game in town. Is there any widespread alternative to SQL, at least for querying tabular data?<p>The problem with it being so abstract doesn't rear its head with simple SELECT statements. They all seem to go fast enough. It isn't until you're joining tables together, or no longer getting data row for row but instead aggregating, summing, averaging, etc. Suddenly sometimes the whole thing can slow to a crawl.<p>Thankfully databases like Postgres let you prepend a command called EXPLAIN to the problematic query, so that you can diagnose the slowness (if you can understand the output of EXPLAIN). But it was a long time before I got good at reading the EXPLAIN output and finding a way to get it to run faster. Even though SQL is so abstract, more just a <i>description</i> of what you want, there is more than one way to write it --- and the difference in speed can be hundreds or thousands of times.<p>I have had the luxury of working mainly with Postgres for 17 years, and toward the end of it I finally feel supremely confident working directly with it, just using the psql command-line client, and hand-typed SQL in text files, to get exactly what I want, and as fast as I want it (which usually is less than a second). Mind you, I don't work with Big Data, just a variety of CRUD apps but they often have mindbending reports requirements.<p>It should not have taken me years and years to master SQL (nor should it you). I think the reason is partly distraction, for those of us that are "full-stack developers", and also that there is so little education about how to master SQL. I mean, the books and posts are out there, but the attention to them from the community at large is small.<p>But SQL is really not harder than the other languages and techniques you know so well. If developers spent as much time on SQL as they do on the ins and outs of React, containerization, CI/CD pipelines, or the quirks of their favorite programming language, I think they would find it easier than most of those things. And it pays rich dividends, because SQL is cross-platform, you can carry that knowledge with you from job to job for the rest of your life, and your inefficient database queries are making your app use quadruple the hardware and 10 times the latency than if you truly mastered SQL.