Even the bulkiest ORMs allow you to use raw SQL. That's why you can use 80 - 90% of the features on the regular basis and hand-tweak regions which cause perform

Even the bulkiest ORMs allow you to use raw SQL. That's why you can use 80 - 90% of the features on the regular basis and hand-tweak regions which cause performance problems or places where you just have to write SQL (e.g. recursive queries). In EF, there's either: Database.SqlQuery<T> - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg696545%28v=vs.113%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg696545%28v=vs.113%... which can return any object or: DbSet<T>.SqlQuery - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg696332%28v=vs.113%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg696332%28v=vs.113%... which returns tracked entities, so you can write raw SQL (e.g. call a stored procedure) and just use the 'mapper' part of the framework. NHibernate has CreateSQLQuery - http://www.nhforge.org/doc/nh/en/#querysql-creating http://www.nhforge.org/doc/nh/en/#querysql-creating I like micro-ORMs, but when you want to skip writing tedious INSERT or UPDATE queries, you have to add extensions to them (at least to Dapper); that, and SQL strings do not really lend well to refactoring and type safety...