For everyone complaining about orm-something - take a look at elixir's Ecto. It basically allows writing sql via native code. Good for composability, type casting, stuff like that.

    Account 
    |> where(active: true)
    |> join(:left, [a], p in Post, on: p.account_id == a.id)
    |> where([a, p], a.foo == "bar" or p.bar == "foo")
    |> group_by([a, p], a.id)
    |> select(...)
    |> limit(10)
    ...
    |> Repo.all()

Plus there are changesets for data validations (can e.g. catch and return uniquness errors via unique index)

P.S. For update/insert queries it doesn't make sense to write UPDATE statement by hand

   UPDATE accounts SET ... 50 fields ... WHERE id = 1

P.P.S. changeset example:

    def changeset(record, attrs) do
      record
      |> cast(attrs, [:number, :note])
      |> validate_required([:number])
      |> validate_format(:number, number_format())
      |> unique_constraint(:number, name: "foo_bar_index")
    end

will return nice error if number is missing (_before_ running sql query) or already taken (_after_ running a query, on DB error)