The blog post[1] by the author about ORMs was what convinced me to purchase the book. I've had too many discussions with colleagues and tech friends struggling with N+1 problems and processing too much stuff in the application when they use mainstream ORMs to think it is a good idea. ORMs make the regular CRUD stuff simpler, but seem to make some more complex queries and transactions harder. There also seems to be an impedance mismatch between SQLs relational model and the OOP object relationship model.

Edit: I know there are ways to avoid N+1 problems with ORMs, but it seems to more easily sneak into code when your SQL queries look just like your application level code and you could easily enumerate over some SQL result, perform some action, and think that it builds an efficient query.

I've recently been working with a hobby project where I use the Clojure HoneySQL[2] library which essentially lets you build SQL queries as you normally would, but in Clojure's EDN syntax. It treats SQL queries as data. You can super easily evaluate them to get the resulting raw SQL query strings. There is no magic behind it and it encourages you to use the full power of your db.

[1] https://theartofpostgresql.com/blog/2019-09-the-r-in-orm/ [2] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql