"The whole point of an abstraction is that it is supposed to simplify"
No, it's supposed to abstract. A simplification is supposed to simplify. Often abstractions have the benefit of simplification, but it's not a requirement.
I migrated a project from MySQL to PostgreSQL last summer, and the project was built on Grails with GORM. I had to migrate the data by hand (mostly easy, save for a couple of edge cases like boolean columns), and I had to change the jdbc driver. That was pretty much it. No rewriting of SQL, no changing of escaping logic, etc. I tell a lie - the auto-sequence generation stuff of postgresql wasn't playing nice with some of the GORM identity stuff, and my code had made some assumptions that turned out not to be 100% true. Those likely would have shown up had I written my own stuff rather than relied on GORM, but it was a little bit of a pain to track those down.
All in all, using the ORM abstracted away the need to write against specific database commands and syntax. A byproduct of that was simplification of most use cases of the database, but the key use was abstraction.
No, it's supposed to abstract. A simplification is supposed to simplify. Often abstractions have the benefit of simplification, but it's not a requirement.
I migrated a project from MySQL to PostgreSQL last summer, and the project was built on Grails with GORM. I had to migrate the data by hand (mostly easy, save for a couple of edge cases like boolean columns), and I had to change the jdbc driver. That was pretty much it. No rewriting of SQL, no changing of escaping logic, etc. I tell a lie - the auto-sequence generation stuff of postgresql wasn't playing nice with some of the GORM identity stuff, and my code had made some assumptions that turned out not to be 100% true. Those likely would have shown up had I written my own stuff rather than relied on GORM, but it was a little bit of a pain to track those down.
All in all, using the ORM abstracted away the need to write against specific database commands and syntax. A byproduct of that was simplification of most use cases of the database, but the key use was abstraction.