The more I've worked with SQL, the more I'm starting to question this idea that huge elegant queries are any good. I used to almost be fanatical about only returning exactly the information I needed from the DB.

They are such a nightmare to read, there's no exposure to them in the code that your IDE can make sense of, if there's a performance problem it's almost always down to one of those huge queries and in the end most software I work with the DB engine is either on the same box or on the same network so pushing across more rows to process in the app in a far more generic way doesn't cause the sort of latency problems you describe (seems a pretty rare config imo).

So I disagree.

Also I disagree with your admittedly fairly throw away comment about ORM & NoSQL. Even if it is just a data persistence layer bunging everything in a NoSQL solution is usually going to be the wrong call in the long run. If you're dealing with data it almost always pays off to keep it in a relational structure because if the app/business is a success someone will invariably start wanting to use the data in other ways. I think NoSQL is good for a very small subset of data storage problems, I want to use it, but have yet to have had a reason to.