Comment by antihero

I think the issue is that while ORMs etc, stuff like ecto…whilst they’re never going to be database native like actual SQL, the value in the abstraction isn’t making querying easier, but making more robust and useful the integration into the host language. It brings it out of database domain and into application domain so that doesn’t have to to constantly reinvented.

You can always be more expressive and portable in raw SQL, that’s obvious, but the things you’re doing have to be used somewhere, so at some point the things you are doing have to cross a barrier. For the 90% use case, ORMs are a pragmatic choice because the good abstractions aren’t about the syntax, they’re about allowing you to talk about and mutate data within the language paradigms that everything else is written in.