This article is all about RBAR vs. set based operations. It has little to do with ORMs per se. That naive ORM users may tend toward RBAR is beside the point.
Go RBAR when it doesn't matter - when it's convenient and you know how it is going to scale ahead of time. A user updating his profile. Creating an order.
Go set based the rest of the time - when you're processing a large batch of data for thousands of user accounts, offload that work into a stored procedure and call it.
ORM does exactly what it is meant to do, and if you're working with data in an OO model, you're going to be doing ORM, whether you know it or not - you will either pull a decent ORM tool off the shelf, or you WILL be writing your own very bad one.
Row-By-Agonizing-Row, or iterating over a list of rows and operating on each individually with a new query.
Your average Java programmer is used to iterating over collections in a while loop, where 30,000 in-memory objects can be quickly modified. It's tempting for said programmer to do the same to ORM-backed objects and issue 30,000 sql update statements across the wire.
Go RBAR when it doesn't matter - when it's convenient and you know how it is going to scale ahead of time. A user updating his profile. Creating an order.
Go set based the rest of the time - when you're processing a large batch of data for thousands of user accounts, offload that work into a stored procedure and call it.
ORM does exactly what it is meant to do, and if you're working with data in an OO model, you're going to be doing ORM, whether you know it or not - you will either pull a decent ORM tool off the shelf, or you WILL be writing your own very bad one.