> A good use of an ORM looks like a metaprogramming environment for conveniently building syntax trees that get converted into intelligent SQL. You know it's working well if the SQL looks somewhat like you'd write yourself and you can build one SQL statement with multiple layers that are abstracted from each other (in C#, think about passing IQueryables around). The structures are parsed into SQL and executed very explicitly only at the end of the chain, do a lot of work, and never produce SELECT N+1s. A good ORM user is thinking in SQL but writing in C# (or whatever your business layer is in).

Sounds very similar to how Django (python) wants you to pass around QuerySets. It's very easy to set up an initial query with joins/etc, then pass the QuerySet into multiple functions to filter it in multiple different ways (each filter creates a new instance, so you're forking the original set and don't have to specify the joins multiple times), but the query itself is never actually run until you try to read from it.