I also dislike ORM, mostly because it takes what I like (beautifully normalized relational data) and squishes it into ugly object graphs. No need for ORM if you

I also dislike ORM, mostly because it takes what I like (beautifully normalized relational data) and squishes it into ugly object graphs. No need for ORM if you don't do OOP. But if I have to do OOP on data from database I much prefer ORM over doing it manually.