I've found ORMs (such as Entity Framework) great for operations that can be described as "find a single thing by PK and update it." For read operations I've fav

I've found ORMs (such as Entity Framework) great for operations that can be described as "find a single thing by PK and update it." For read operations I've favored this strategy: "Imagine the ideal result set for the task at hand. Use SQL to deliver that result set. Do the rest of the work in your app language of choice." Edit: I guess I should clarify that I would favor using any library that maps result sets to lists of objects. And I would consider that to be part of "do the rest of the work in your app language of choice."