Even folks who use an ORM still need to go outside the ORM for some operations -- especially reporting (like the example in the article). I find ORM's very helpful for basic CRUD operations, especially when one conceptual entity of data maps to one or two database tables directly. But there are just some things that can be expressed in SQL more efficiently than you could in OOP programming (and vice-versa).

Thanks. That's for sure true, using an ORM to avoid the boring CRUD stuff is definitely a good thing. However, this shows once again that, for non-trivial systems, you still have to resort to plain SQL, which kind of locks you in to your database of choice.

...we let people like you shuffle simple result sets in and out of web pages, freeing us up to do more interesting things?

(ha ha, only serious)

I don't get it. I don't think your comment has anything to do with mine.

"I'm genuinely curious as to how people here get stuff done." -- we're not doing what you're apparently doing.