[pmontra]

Almost. The best of both worlds would be an ORM that can understand the SQL query and populate its objects/structs/whatever with the result. I have to manually process the results now.

If I had an ORM like that maybe I would write all SELECTs directly in SQL.

What makes that impractical in projects with multiple developers is that about half of them don't know SQL nowadays. They know how to use the ORM and the language to write CRUD queries and that's all. If they see SELECT * FROM invoices WHERE customer_id = ? they probably understand it. Nested queries, HAVING, GROUP BY... oops! CTEs... OMG! This means that sometimes they write three or four queries when one would be enough.