[ilyak]

Hibernate is horrible. But, object datastores aren't an option most often.

There are a lot of things wrong with SQL. For example, it's hard to do non-trivial queries because you can't say A = SELECT something FROM foo; SELECT another FROM bar WHERE field IN A. Of course, you can make a view, but views are database structure, and you really really really don't want to change database structure in runtime. So SQL sucks in some places.

In object-oriented programs they have no use of your "tuples". They just can't do anything useful of them, nor give them away (because that would violate code separation). So they have to turn your tuples into some objects (or other objects). Therefore, ORMs.