A good ORM should map pretty directly and logically to SQL, and in my experience is about convenience more than anything. In all fairness, you practically have

A good ORM should map pretty directly and logically to SQL, and in my experience is about convenience more than anything. In all fairness, you practically have to be able to write your own ORM to use an ORM effectively; understanding all the black magic under the hood so it doesn't shoot you in the foot. I still think it's worth it though. There are also very light weight ORMs which take in a sql query and just do object mapping with the result. As with everything, it depends on your use case.