Your being worried about ORM reminds me that I felt similarly in your position, years ago. Looking back, I think this may be partly a lack of experience with l

Your being worried about ORM reminds me that I felt similarly in your position, years ago. Looking back, I think this may be partly a lack of experience with languages with memory management - you simply have to learn to let go. But there is also a valid worry about flexibility and the degree to which you are losing the power of SQL. To address that you need to think carefully about what you are doing and have some faith in the experience of others. If you go with Django, and want to make a normal-ish web site, Django's ORM is fine. In fact, it's surprisingly powerful for what it is. But if you really want to be able to access SQL within your ORM then, at least for Python, you need to use SQLAlchemy. The downside is that SQLAlchemy will complicate Django. So I would suggest starting with Django alone, and really giving that a fair chance, and then, if necessary, looking at SQLAlchemy.