It’s a good article. At Namely we use Dapper which is a “micro-ORM” developed by the folks at StackOverflow for .NET. I really like it because it gives us the mapping part without the sql code generation part which I think is the thing that ultimately gets you in trouble, and it works really well with Postgres and SQL Server.
Yes. The key is designing to the tool’s strength. Build a row oriented database model in the application language that matches the DB schema. This is trivial for the ORM (like Dapper or ActiveRecord) and you save boiler plate. For simple apps this might be enough. For richer domain models it is often simpler to map to the domain model from the database model mapping in application code than fighting the ORM to do it just right from DB to domain model. Another alternative is to design to tools and design your domain model to reduce the friction from the ORM. These trade-offs are specific to each application.
