[keithnoizu]

  Caching can only go so far . . . eventually you are going to need to refactor or tweak schemas and adjust queries. Especially if you are dealing with user centric / heavy write data although yes cache on write can also reduce some strain.

 Personally I would take hand rolled DAOs over magically generated ORM/AR logic any day. The upfront cost is marginally higher but modifying, adjusting and logically grouping data is much more straight forward.

[webjprgm]

That's what I do. I have a DB class in PHP that makes most queries easy (much easier than Pear or PDO), and all DAOs are similar to each other so it's a copy-paste-modify to add a new one.

Then I have static methods to do the special queries that the post author talks about, which may return direct result sets, an integer, generated objects with fewer columns, or large object trees depending on the case.

ORM would be faster (developer time) for a prototype site, but do-it-yourself DAOs work just fine.