When you're dealing with SQL you're dealing with items in sets, and really all you're doing is joining, slicing and filtering sets of data to obtain the results you want, perhaps with some extra sugar like aggregation, but in the main it's groups of objects and that's quite intuitive.
On the opposite side is object-orientation where you're dealing with instances of objects. Very intuitive when dealing with properties of an instance (perhaps columns in a table for a particular instance) but not when dealing with multiple instances. Instances of objects don't really gel with sets of objects for various reasons - this class of problems is known as object-relational impedance mismatch (Ireland et al, 2009; Colley et al, 2020). This is why ORMs are often used for development, as a smooth translation layer between object-orientation and set-orientation. Each paradigm is perfectly good within its own context, but they are not particularly compatible approaches.
References if you're interested:
Ireland, C., Bowers, D., Newton, M. and Waugh, K., 2009, March. A classification of object-relational impedance mismatch. In 2009 First International Confernce on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (pp. 36-43). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5071809/
Colley, D., Stanier, C. and Asaduzzaman, M., 2020. Investigating the effects of object-relational impedance mismatch on the efficiency of object-relational mapping frameworks. Journal of Database Management (JDM), 31(4), pp.1-23. https://www.igi-global.com/article/investigating-the-effects...
On the opposite side is object-orientation where you're dealing with instances of objects. Very intuitive when dealing with properties of an instance (perhaps columns in a table for a particular instance) but not when dealing with multiple instances. Instances of objects don't really gel with sets of objects for various reasons - this class of problems is known as object-relational impedance mismatch (Ireland et al, 2009; Colley et al, 2020). This is why ORMs are often used for development, as a smooth translation layer between object-orientation and set-orientation. Each paradigm is perfectly good within its own context, but they are not particularly compatible approaches.
References if you're interested:
Ireland, C., Bowers, D., Newton, M. and Waugh, K., 2009, March. A classification of object-relational impedance mismatch. In 2009 First International Confernce on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (pp. 36-43). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5071809/
Colley, D., Stanier, C. and Asaduzzaman, M., 2020. Investigating the effects of object-relational impedance mismatch on the efficiency of object-relational mapping frameworks. Journal of Database Management (JDM), 31(4), pp.1-23. https://www.igi-global.com/article/investigating-the-effects...