ORMs Suck?

As systems become more complex, software developers must rely upon more abstractions. Each abstraction tries to hide complexity, letting a developer write software that "handles" the many variations of modern computing.
However, the "leaky abstraction" law claims that developers of reliable software must learn the abstraction's underlying details anyway.

Example:
The SQL language abstracts away the procedural steps for querying a database, allowing one to merely define what one wants. But certain SQL queries are thousands of times slower than other logically equivalent queries. On an even higher level of abstraction, ORM systems, which isolate object-oriented code from the implementation of object persistence using a relational database, still force the programmer to think in terms of databases, tables, and native SQL queries as soon as performance of ORM-generated queries becomes a concern.

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Will NoSQL kill the DBA position?

I’m afraid it’s unlikely. You see, every new or old technology has its advantages and drawbacks. The reality is that NoSQL stands for “Not Just SQL” rather than “No SQL” so the relational database isn't going away anytime soon. Organizations still need transaction atomicity for their mission critical business transactions. When a customer makes a credit card payment or a trader executes a trade, those business transactions need to be committed in real-time to disk. The state of the transaction and its data needs to be consistent wherever that data is updated and accessed from. The reason why NoSQL solutions are so fast, elastic, scalable, and available is because they are basically in-memory distributed data stores that run across multiple nodes and physical servers–meaning that if one node fails, there are plenty others to take over. Therefore when a transaction writes to one node, it’s incredibly fast–but that data has to then be replicated across all nodes in the NoSQL grid for the data to be truly consistent.

Read/Write consistency is still something that NoSQL based solutions have yet to conquer; they sacrifice ACID for read/write performance, elasticity, and high availability.  So while NoSQL enables applications to scale with high transaction concurrency and data volumes, they need to work in parallel with relational databases to ensure data consistency.

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