[realusername]

I struggle to see how you could maintain a large backend app without a good ORM to support it, that would be painful for sure

[bdcravens]

It was done before ORM became en vogue using SQL and recordsets. When it got too hairy we'd just put an abstraction in place, similar to how many apps end up doing the same atop the ORM via service objects, etc.

[realusername]

Yeah you always can but you end up with an in-house kind of ORM and those tend to not evolve too well in my experience.