[JodieBenitez]

It's more about the Mapping than the querying. Luckily good ORMs let you fetch your objects using... SQL, which is a fine language for querying (doh):

    for p in Person.objects.raw('SELECT * FROM myapp_person'):
        print(p)

[MichaelCollins]

This sort of thing can be very good in the right hands, but it also facilitates the antipattern of select * with no conditions, then doing the real selection of columns and filtering of rows in code.

[JodieBenitez]

There is no point in selecting columns here since what we want is objects, complete with all their properties. As for the rows, of course you can filter in your SQL:

    Person.objects.raw('SELECT * FROM myapp_person WHERE last_name = %s', ["Doe"])

Should you want to work without your models... well, you still have access to your connection object and can happily fetch whatever column or aggregate you want.