> In fact, ORMs have been a massive headache because I can think in SQL but not in whatever the creator of the ORM was thinking in.

Yes, fully agree on ORMs. They DO have one nice feature though: simple CRUD operations are way less verbose than constructing SQL statements.

What we lack is a better integration between the host language and the databse. Constructing a prepared statement from a string, setting parameters, executing, fetching rows from the result set and mapping back to fields... all is a major, repetitive PITA.

And yes, I find it easy to think in SQL and often wonder WTH an ORM is going to generate. Just recently I improved performance of an application by going from ORM to SQL; first I reduced number of round-trips (ORM/efcore first wants you to fetch an entity before you can update it), second, I batched updates into a single session/transaction. Win! :) [Oh, and don't get me started ranting about ORM and transactions.]