Using an ORM does buy you some abstraction, though. You get to worry about your business objects and fields instead of your tables and columns. (Depending on th

Using an ORM does buy you some abstraction, though. You get to worry about your business objects and fields instead of your tables and columns. (Depending on the language/situation this can be a big deal) You're right that it doesn't provide all the abstraction you probably want, but it easily gives you a toehold on which to build that abstraction. Doing it from scratch, by hand is often a much worse place to start.