I prefer ORMs for the CRUD stuff--especially for data validations and things. Filtering and querying, though, tends to benefit from some kind of structure query

I prefer ORMs for the CRUD stuff--especially for data validations and things. Filtering and querying, though, tends to benefit from some kind of structure query language. That said, there is a good argument to be made that, if you've factored everything correctly (ha) and done your design work up front properly (ha ha) you've rendered the database as just another sort of persistence engine, so even an ORM is not always necessary.