This is a pragmatic piece of Fowler on the rather dry topic of Object-relational mappings - in short, the attempt to marry an object-oriented code base with a relational data base.
Usually you’d get enough early success to commit deeply to the framework and only after a while did you realize you were in a quagmire - this is where I sympathize greatly with Ted Neward’s famous quote that object-relational mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
What Fowler refers to here, is Ted Neward’s article “The Vietnam Of Computer Science”
I’ve never worked on a codebase where using ORMs wasn’t better than rolling your own queries. What are people writing that they actually need the marginal performance gains? And even if that’s worth it, why not just use raw queries in your critical paths?
Every time I have to write or modify raw SQL it feels like I’m throwing away all my static checking features and increasing the chance of bugs, because I have no idea of the query matches my schema or if it’ll blow up at runtime.