I started a project recently using no ORM and having the flexibility to easily merge queries and extract exactly the data I need is very helpful. Converting the

I started a project recently using no ORM and having the flexibility to easily merge queries and extract exactly the data I need is very helpful. Converting the rows to objects hasn't been a major concern and I have compile-time type checking against the database schema (for non-dynamically built queries). I'd say that the only real issue I have is building dynamic queries and some helpers for joins to make it easy to confirm that joins are against the right keys and tables. But that hasn't been much of an issue.