It's like a bell curve for me personally. The things I do with databases between the 25th and 75th percentiles of query complexity fit into an ORM or query builder tool nicely. These also tend to be the bulk of what I need. But those tools add more overhead to the effort of writing simple <25th percentile SQL (like small single-table queries), and then end up being wholly inadequate for the complexity above the 75th percentile, where the library often doesn't have good representation or documentation for the complex things a database can actually do for you in advanced use cases (leading you to do a less efficient similar operation in your programming language), or they try to be too generic to many databases and then aren't able to provide anything that might be specific to Postgres which leads you back to writing raw SQL again.

A good query builder is more important than ORM imo. That's what I like about sqlalchemy. The query builder pretty much maps 1:1 to SQL and you can use it with or without the ORM mapping. Most of my projects have a mix of both along with plain SQL for some of the meatier queries.

A good query builder is more important than ORM imo. That's what I like about sqlalchemy. The query builder pretty much maps 1:1 to SQL and you can use it with or without the ORM mapping. Most of my projects have a mix of both along with plain SQL for some of the meatier queries.