History and Background of ORM ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) is a technology that automatically maps objects in object-oriented programming languages to tables in relational databases. It emerged in the early 1990s as object-oriented programming became mainstream and was designed to address the Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch between objects and tables. The first commercial ORM tool was TOPLink (now Oracle TopLink), released in 1994 for Smalltalk environments and later ported to Java in 1996. That helped spread ORM concepts throughout the enterprise Java ecosystem. ...