So far ORMs are not designed to handle huge amount of data, unless you have a very decent caching system (for reading) and do your operations asynchronously, and even in this case, writing operations should be delegated to the DB connector, bypassing the ORM. That's the hard lesson I have learn over the last 8 years using Doctrine and other secondary ORMs.
You can afford to use ORM for huge operations, but you need the infrastructure (and the logic) that can follow.
the only thing with laravel is that the ORM is really slow with big data set insertion, through relationships.
Also, that is the default ORM you can install another one as you please.
You can always paginate your result set or pushdown aggregation to your database engine.
So far ORMs are not designed to handle huge amount of data, unless you have a very decent caching system (for reading) and do your operations asynchronously, and even in this case, writing operations should be delegated to the DB connector, bypassing the ORM. That's the hard lesson I have learn over the last 8 years using Doctrine and other secondary ORMs.
You can afford to use ORM for huge operations, but you need the infrastructure (and the logic) that can follow.
have u tried saveQuitely() or QueryBuilder update() yet?