I'm saying that your server side representation could also be done as a relation. No need for object orientation. I don't have a problem with the M part of ORM, but with the O part.

_If_ you are having different representations, than having an automated mapper between representations is good. Agreed, yes.

I’m really not a fan of ORMs, I don’t think they save any time because to use them in a safe way, you NEED to fully understand the SQL that will be run. There’s no shortcut from this and it’s plainly just an extra step.

I’ve been bitten too many times but one ironic problem is that they’re so damned reliable. 99.999% of the time your use of an ORM will be just fine. It can be hard to argue against sometimes even though that 0.001 time can be an extinction level event for the company.

So if you need to understand the SQL that will be run anyway and ORMs occasionally introduce disastrous behaviour, why persist with them?

Well to start with the obvious, SQL is not panacea, you can still be bitten with non-deterministic behaviour when you hand craft every query in sql (e.g. when was the last time you updated stats on that relation - will the optimizer select an appropriate strategy?).

But a stronger reason is that some harder queries just suck to write correctly in SQL. Maybe you’re working with some kind of tree or graph and need a recursive common table expression: Enjoy! It might be better in most cases to write such a query at a higher level of abstraction (ORM) and take advantage of the more productive testing facilities.

You can model relations in your language without using SQL. (You could have a mapper from your internal modelling of joins etc to how you talk to your database.)

In eg Haskell that works really well, but other languages are also flexible enough.

The relational model is great. Embrace it, because it isn’t going anywhere.