1. Network transfer time depends on size of data payload and will basically always dwarf cpu operations unless something is seriously messed up

2. Query performance is dependent on the query and table size. They won't all be < 1msec. Not everything can be an indexed O(1) lookup

3. Generally speaking, network RTT and query performance is going to dwarf time for ORM to parse the result

4. A raw SQL driver ALSO needs to parse the result if you want to do anything with the data in the general purpose language