Comment by sklivvz1971

I honestly do not understand ActiveRecord and ORMs in general. There is the obvious advantage of mapping, for which one merely needs microORMs. Even by reading this article one realizes that for anything complex, it is much simpler to directly write SQL queries rather than use byzantine techniques whose only raison d'etre is to coerce the ORM into writing those SQL queries. I mean -- why not write SQL directly? :-)

There's the not-so-common case of needing database independence as well, but at that point DB perf becomes a really hard problem to solve generally...