"Those advantages aren't inherent to an ORM, they come from having a uniform representation (object) and a tool that can generate boilerplate (ORM). The author sounds like he's making his main representation relational (though he mentions generating helper objects) and using SQLAlchemy's SQL generation/reflection as his boilerplate maker. In my own work (data management, analysis & some visualization) I use a hand rolled table manipulation library and code most things extremely table centric: f(table) -> table. Works great for me. For an even more extreme view, read [Ben Moseley & Peter Mark's FRP paper (PDF)](http://web.mac.com/ben_mos...). Of course the paper is from 2006 and so far there are 0 implementations and only 15 members of the google groups, so ORM's definitely win when it comes to working code." - David Gingrich