If you have to interact with a system that's so poorly designed that you need an adapter to make sense of it, then sure, use an adapter. The thing is, the more

If you have to interact with a system that's so poorly designed that you need an adapter to make sense of it, then sure, use an adapter. The thing is, the more you use an ORM, the less and less thought you put into designing your database to have a sensible interface of its own, so of course your database isn't going to have a sensible interface. Probably not as horrific as what you're describing, but as much as an ORM can solve that kind of problem, it can also perpetuate it. I'm almost terrified to ask how your DB schema got that fucked, but I'm going to guess it's because it's very tightly coupled to that giant legacy internal application and no one thought to take it seriously as its own service component with a consciously designed interface.