But of course, as the queries get more and more complex, the flexibility of the ORM syntax approaches the flexibility SQL. In the end, there are many situations one would rather just use SQL.

For example, in Go, I use Gorp, which has a Select() function where you pass in the SELECT query string (plus bound values) and the target type, and it loads every result row into an object of that type. So you can have an arbitrarily complex SQL query as long as it starts with `SELECT one_table.* FROM`. That's a marvelous design.

And when you have to do a query that returns results from multiple tables? Guess what, you just use the normal SQL module from the standard library.

  postgres=# SELECT * FROM domains WHERE id = 'foo';
  ERROR:  invalid input syntax for integer: "foo"
  LINE 1: SELECT * FROM domains WHERE id = 'foo';
                                           ^