We might be talking past each other. I'm curious why you see such a strong distinction between ORM and active record. To that extent, do you have any references or links that explain Active Record as you understand it? I'm familiar with active record, but I don't think quite as much as you - I think I need to learn more. Do you have any good references I could look at?
My point is that (bluntly speaking), ORMs are intrinsically fucked because relational mapping and object mapping are just fundamentally different. Because of that difference, some things will always be difficult when doing so in any orm.
Here is an example of something that an ORM does well:
```
Person p = entityManger.findById(123);
p.setAge(23);
entityManager.persist(p);
```
I suppose an active record example is something like:
```
Person p = Person.findById(123);
p.setAge(23);
p.persist();
```
Regardless, of Active Record or ORM, the above is doing this query:
```
update person set age = 23 where id = 123;
```
The above is simple. When trying to update a linked entity is an example where ORMs are going to have complexity. Let's say a person owns books, and books are unique in the system. This type of query:
```
update book set person_id = (select id from person where name = 'Joe')
where person_id = (select id from person where name = 'Jill')
```
In code, that looks like this:
```
Person joe = findByName("Joe");
Person jill = findByName("Jill");
jill.getBooks().stream().forEach(book -> { book.setPerson(joe); book.persist()) });
```
The ORM code is so convoluted... We do a full select for two Person entities, possibly eager fetching all their books with more queries (N+1) problem, but all other entities attached to a person as well, and then we do 'N' update statements. These types of problems are AFAIK unavoidable. They will happen for one scenario or another. One can choose the object representation to mitigate one case or another, but it's not long before something that is trivial in SQL becomes a huge burden in OO.
Thus, my thesis, Object-Relation Mapping will create unavoidable cases of convoluted code because RDBMS do not have a perfect mapping to Objects. The mapping is not perfect,the result of this is intrinsic complexity that is easily solved by sticking to SQL, but very difficult in ORMs (which manifest as various issues of inappropriate eager vs inappropriate late fetching, N+1 queries, caching issues, transaction issues, etc..)