Over on PHPEverywhere there's a posting that follows something I've thought all along - there's a fine line between abstraction and "object oriented crap".

Some people say that Object-Relational is good because it allows us to hide the implementation details. More crud. The most common change is to add a new field to the database. This means we need to add a new field to the object-relational system, and we need to add code in our software to make use of the new field - so where is the data hiding? It's irrelevant.

The mistake here is in believing that the OOP approach is generally superior to the set-based way, hence the misconception that the programmer should generally avoid using SQL. Of course for every pundit that says something there are exceptions.

I'm glad someone finally came out and said that OOP is not always the way to go. Sure, there have been people in the past that say "OOP is a good tool, but not right in all situations", but not many that will just out-and-out say that OOP can be more of an issue and cause more overhead that do actual work in the script...Be sure to check out the Additional Reading at the end.