ORMs
ngl, i find the best part of ORMs to be the mapping part (turning query results into an object), not the other stuff. i do like fluent query builders, but select email, name from users where id = ? feels just as natural to me as User.filter({id: something}).find_one(), even ignoring the wasted bandwidth there
this is why i love sqlx. it's just a compile-time query response mapper that turns your query into a struct. it does the thing i want ORMs to do for me without doing the stuff i don't want ORMs to do
though maybe having a no-ql database that builds queries exclusively through builders and sends them with a wire format would be pretty cool for a slight performance bump. hmm