When I started web work ~9 years ago, it was with Rails and ActiveRecord, which turns out to be incredibly good for basic queries and pretty basic apps. So good to the point where I never bothered to go too far into SQL until years later, which was a mistake.

When doing work in python, I don't feel it has a comparable ORM, to where I kind of write my own files that have things like finders and updaters and creators. In most cases, I've found it's much better than SQLAlchemy. Dealing with joins, and things like math, meaning averages, sums, distributions, division, is so much better to be done in the query rather than more basic queries and looping through the results.

There are of course cases like injections to look at, but lots of things I have are calculations of data and showing it, so we're able to handle it with raw queries. Also, ActiveRecord has ways to enforce no injections.

In lots of cases, we've found that using an ORM to start, finding slowness, and moving towards raw queries is a great way to go.