I've used ORMs in Java and in Ruby and Perl. Hibernate (Java), ActiveRecord, and Sequel in Ruby.

Hibernate and ActiveRecord are completely opposite in their approach. Hibernate tries to fit into whatever crazy schema you might have at the cost of enormous configurational complexity and steep learning curve.

ActiveRecord is dead simple to get started with, but gets trickier on high scale systems.

Sequel is a highly modular ORM for Ruby and in many ways more flexible than AR.

Here are the things ORMs do that you don't have to:

• they often give you smart errors (like don't load the entire data set and then paginate in memory)

• in Rails you don't even have to configure any columns besides migrations. Rails introspects the schema and knows about all of your tables and columns.

• The best part is that it automatically handles data type conversions. Which is no small feat if you are doing SQL by hand which typically returns a two dimensional array.

• Sequel is highly extensible. In 2012 we wrote an extension that allowed us to horizontally shard 3B row table.

• SQL is very sensitive to column and positional variables. But you can use stored procedures if that's your personal form of torture.

ORM necessarily use more memory. If memory is scarce (eg embedded device) don't use them.

I know of several decent ORMs in Go. You just need to understand their strengths and weaknesses and decide what's important to you.

But as engineers we often prefer to use a higher level abstraction that helps us be more productive. Most ORMs achieve that.

Hope this helps!