I'd say the problem is more with OO. The author touches on this a little towards the end, but ORM fulfills the demand to put relational data into objects. The issue is with all these developers insisting that they want to think only in a limited set of types, even when the page they're rendering needs half the properties of one type and a few more from another type. Something like linq2sql can actually be the answer here, if you use it to select an anonymous type containing exactly what you want, the you only need one round trip and you haven't wasted and processing.