I lean nowadays towards: For ~90% of your database use, ORMs do basically the same queries and get rid of a massive amount of boilerplate and potential errors.

I lean nowadays towards: For ~90% of your database use, ORMs do basically the same queries and get rid of a massive amount of boilerplate and potential errors. Use 'em so you don't spend all day manually mapping object fields to the right slots in SQL statements. For the other ~10% of database use, ORMs make it a massive pain to write a query that does what you actually want, or do something boneheadedly inefficient. So use an ORM that makes it easy to drop to pure SQL when you need to, and don't hesitate to do it if the situation calls for it.