Not the parent, but when I'm using SA (sqlalchemy) I tend to just use the ORM for everything. If I needed something to be super performant I might get closer to

Not the parent, but when I'm using SA (sqlalchemy) I tend to just use the ORM for everything. If I needed something to be super performant I might get closer to the raw SQL – though generally I find development so much faster when SA handles everything for me. If you're using a different ORM then things are probably going to be different. I've worked with a few in various languages and SA is the only one I've found that allows me to express any complex query directly via the ORM. I've heard there are some edge cases where you need to drop down a layer but I haven't run into them yet.