[evantbyrne]

A well-designed ORM can help you with performance, for example, by reducing the amount of effort to do things like fetch related records in a single query. The really good ones also handle migrations. And finally, all of the popular ones I'm aware of allow developers to use them just for mapping results to objects. I would say that in general the further an ORM strays from SQL concepts the more troublesome it is likely to be. If the query syntax looks like Mongo, then you probably won't have a good time when doing more advanced things.