> SQL is fine, no problem with it unless you are embedding queries in a OO application

which is essentially every single production deployment of a SQL database in the last twenty years. That's the problem.

I’ve played a bit with Jeremy Evans’s Sequel (http://sequel.jeremyevans.net), and I’m not sure that ORMs are necessarily constrained along this dichotomy (easy to use but with poor performance vs great performance but hard to use). Sequel seems to be about making the hard things easy and reducing the amount of time you need to drop to pure SQL to almost zero.

As someone who has built with Oracle’s Pro C(++) and with various ORMs, Sequel is an ORM that makes me reasonably happy and gives me the expressiveness of embedded SQL without compromising my object model.