SQL and ORM are a superb fit for a great many applications, incidentally a large share of real world applications. The four-letter abbrev. CRUD comes to mind, as well as reporting.
Most kinds of NoSQL remove some benefits of the relational model while not really giving you the benefits of object persistence. I never felt a great need to use it; since quite some of these databases also had all sorts of issues that not exactly endeared trust for serious applications -- I'm not working on software where that's an OK thing to have (though for others it might be an acceptable tradeoff).
The real deal persistent object databases are a completely different beast from both NoSQL and relational models (only some NoSQL concepts like explicit / application-level indexing carry over). Two important things to note about these: 1.) There are not many of them 2.) Properly using them already requires proper OO technique. Failing 2.) will make it an unmaintainable mess. Certain kinds of applications benefit greatly from these, and there they also tend to perform better in both developer experience and efficiency as well as application performance than forcing a huge impedance mismatch down the throat of an ORM -- which pretty much always means that the underlying relational DB is used in very anti-patternish ways, resulting in poor performance regardless how good the DB actually is.
SQL and ORM are a superb fit for a great many applications, incidentally a large share of real world applications. The four-letter abbrev. CRUD comes to mind, as well as reporting.
Most kinds of NoSQL remove some benefits of the relational model while not really giving you the benefits of object persistence. I never felt a great need to use it; since quite some of these databases also had all sorts of issues that not exactly endeared trust for serious applications -- I'm not working on software where that's an OK thing to have (though for others it might be an acceptable tradeoff).
The real deal persistent object databases are a completely different beast from both NoSQL and relational models (only some NoSQL concepts like explicit / application-level indexing carry over). Two important things to note about these: 1.) There are not many of them 2.) Properly using them already requires proper OO technique. Failing 2.) will make it an unmaintainable mess. Certain kinds of applications benefit greatly from these, and there they also tend to perform better in both developer experience and efficiency as well as application performance than forcing a huge impedance mismatch down the throat of an ORM -- which pretty much always means that the underlying relational DB is used in very anti-patternish ways, resulting in poor performance regardless how good the DB actually is.