That said I find it curious that you complain about not seeing where DB queries happen, and at the same time bemoan the missing abstractions. Abstractions are all about not caring what happens on the low level, so it sounds like you have conflicting goals.
My take on this is that a relational database already has a lot of high-level abstractions going on, and the trouble with ORM mappers (or the way a lot of them are used) is that they dump these abstractions and actually take a step down the scale.
(Think about it: which is a higher level language: perl or SQL?)
