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I have worked with ORMs and with raw SQL. In my personal experience, using raw SQL exclusively becomes time consuming when you need to make the jump between the raw sql results and objects.

With a well designed ORM, it should be possible to have the best of both worlds. One of the features that I value in Django's builtin ORM is the ability to almost seamlessly drop down to raw SQL when needed:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/

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"using raw SQL exclusively becomes time consuming when you need to make the jump between the raw sql results and objects"

I don't find that to be true. You write the SQL, you've already written your Objects, you write a 2-3 line row -> object(s) mapper (supported by your own utils, or something like Spring). You have clear control and mapping between SQL and Object.

This said, I like what I've seen and used of the Django ORM so far, but then my application has not been anywhere close to as complex as the "day job" RDBMS.

If you have entity with 10 fields and 5 nested collections (which may also have more nested objects) and you need load full object for edit (and save it after), it will be more than '2-3 line'

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