[edoo]

I've been doing firmware for the better part of a decade and I used to do PHP MVC web stuff before that for a megacorp. They used Yii which had ActiveRecord. You could have it scan your entire db and generate all the models including relations, then abstract from those models for the business logic. Any db changes... just re-run the generation. I can make a complex 15 table database and all the models in a few hours and jump right into productivity. Seems weird people are still going through problems with this today.