[Gustek]

I like to say "ORMs make easy thing easier and hard things harder".

What i mean by that is, any simple CRUD operations are much easier in ORM. The hard things, i mean any complex queries that need more than one join you are probably better of writing yourself.

In the end i prefer to do inserts, updates and deletes with ORM (or some other database abstraction tools) but most SELECTs i write myself, fetching exactly what i need and mapping result to objects if needed manually.

[craigvn]

I pretty much do the same. The CUD is ORM, and some simple selects in C# Linq, but as soon as the query is a bit more complicated I crack out the SQL. It does not have to be all or nothing.

[IndianAstronaut]

Do uou use metadata from the db driver to do type mappings?

[Gustek]

Not sure what you asking about. Do you mean if I define database structure in my code? The answer is: yes. I don't know about any database abstraction library that would provide you with convenience methods to query database with type checking and stuff without giving it the schema.