i liked it, but i do work with bigger data sets... make it easy? orm... if its active record or even datamapper just try throwing 100k new rows in a table every day, and then the joins... bah, skip the orm and start working with any sets that add couple hundres of thousands rows every day and you will very quickly see the aches of using sql... and the price of hardware you need to run it smoothly... and then if they related and youre using locks... probably a lot ppl have same feelings as me