I also don't get the ORM stuff: typically you work either (1) with lots of different objects organized in some kind of document (in NoSQL sense), and you want all these objects to be predictable, free from side effects and clearly serializable to e.g. JSON, or (2) with bulk data which you transform and aggregate to come with a small collection of fully constructed (also, denormalized) objects, and for this purpose SQL is beautiful. Or else they wouldn't've invented Linq to Collections.