I used to have a similar opinion, but today I'm not so much against it. There was a project where I did not have access to the "official" database (Oracle) and was forced to develop against MySQL instead. Granted, it was a reasonably simple application, but still, most of the queries _just_worked_ on both MySQL and Oracle. I would also argue that for querying you don't need ORM (might be better off with something like Jooq), but for complex updates, ORM can be a godsend.