ORMs such as ActiveRecord or DataMapper are fabulous tools that have improved the speed at which we're able to develop working, shippable products. As DSLs for working with our persistence layers, they've proven their worth time and time again, but at the cost of stunting our collective knowledge about the built-in, powerful features that different databases have to offer. Let's take a look at some of those features, rediscover what we've left behind by accepting abstraction, and recover some tools that can help ensure the long-term health of our applications.