I've never used an ORM (Hibernate, Doctrine) when you can't also write the queries yourself and then leave the object mapping to the ORM. It's not an either/or

I've never used an ORM (Hibernate, Doctrine) when you can't also write the queries yourself and then leave the object mapping to the ORM. It's not an either/or. Often I'll use the ORM for saving, and SQL for retrieving.