Why I Use Raw SQL Instead of an ORM (Most of the Time)

This is going to be controversial, so let me start with the disclaimer: ORMs are fine. Prisma, SQLAlchemy, Drizzle — they're all good tools built by smart people. I use them.

But for the Nexural platform — 185 tables, complex joins, materialized views, row-level security — raw SQL was the right call for the critical paths. Here's why.

The Moment I Switched

I was using Prisma. The dashboard loaded in 200ms locally. In production with real data, it took 4.2 seconds.

I ran \\