it would be great to “just” have a DB with a binary protocol that makes it unnecessary to write an ORM.

Other people have talked about other parts of the post so I want to focus on this one.

The problem an ORM solves is not a problem of SQL being textual. Just switching to a binary representation will have little or no impact on the need for an ORM. The ORM is solving the problem that’s in its name: bridging the conceptual gap between an object-oriented data model and a relational data model. “A relational data model” isn’t about how queries are represented in a wire protocol; instead, it is about how data, and relationships between pieces of data, are organized.

So, okay, what if you get rid of the relational data model and make your database store objects directly? You can! NoSQL databases had a surge in popularity not too long ago, and before that, there have been lots of object databases.

What you’re likely to discover in an application of any real complexity, though, and the reason the industry has cooled somewhat on NoSQL databases after the initial hype cycle, is that the relational model turns out to be popular for a reason: it is extremely useful, and some of its useful properties are awkward to express in terms of operations on objects. True, you can ditch the ORM, but often you end up introducing complex queries to do things that are simple in SQL and the net result is more complex and harder to maintain than when you started. (Note “often” here; sometimes non-relational databases are the best tool for the job.)

And even in an object database, you still have to know what you’re doing! Storing objects instead of relational tuples won’t magically cause all your previously-slow queries to become lightning-fast. You will still need to think about data access patterns and indexes and caching and the rest. If the problem you’re trying to solve is “my queries are inefficient,” fixing the queries is a much better first step than ditching the entire database and starting over.