Is the ORM Really a Good Tool?

As much as possible use the ORM to do the default thing. You can signal one model to another and have the other model do something based on the other one. I don't know how you feel, but there's a lot of sites that just don't understand how their web app interacts with their database. It takes like six seconds for the page to load or you know, four parts of the site that are like spending little Ajax things for like five seconds.