[kangoo1707]

Use both. Many of the business logics are just as simple as query by id, filter/sort by a couple of columns. A smart ORM will handle fetching relationships without hitting N+1 problem

For advanced queries, you can write raw SQL

The way I see it, an ORM has three useful features:

- A migration/seed mechanism (you will need it anyway)

- A schema definition for mapping tables to object

- A query builder

If you feel that an ORM is too heavy, you can seek for just the query builder.

[fernandotakai]

i worked on a mid-sized django app and that was basically what we did:

* for normal queries (select /cols from table where id etc etc) we just used plain django orm. even for weird joins, django orm makes it a lot easier than using raw sql

when we needed raw speed, we just wrote raw sql and delegated to django sql layer -- that way we leverage everything the framework has with raw sql power.