Upfront: I really dislike ORMs. They're an unnecessary abstraction and a performance headache as an extra layer of middleware to worry about keeping up to date.

Upfront: I really dislike ORMs. They're an unnecessary abstraction and a performance headache as an extra layer of middleware to worry about keeping up to date. I'd never use one in production. But we do always need a clean way to handle CRUD between apps and DBs, that ideally doesn't require custom calls for each and every data view. Here's the thing: Probably 90% of CRUD can be handled with generic updates and inserts. Raw JSON reads can be passed back to the client... let the client know how to cast or structure those to complex data types. The rest, that the server has to manipulate, can be cast / structured using the same classes the client uses, if in node. The actual meat of really complex reads or really optimized writes should always be exceptional and done by hand.