1. Query building, particularly when the query needs to be dynamic based on user input? Do you end up concatenating strings together or do you use a separate query builder?
2. Coalescing result sets produced by JOINs back into object form? Example: if you want to fetch users along with all their posts your query will return multiple rows per user, but when working with objects in your app you want each user to have a list of posts so you can simply say users.posts.
3. Property change tracking? Example: different parts of your app might update different properties for each user. If the user's email and last_login changes you need to write one query. If the user's password changes you need to write a different query. If the user's email, name, and location changes you need to write another query. An ORM with change tracking will figure out exactly which properties have been modified and issue the correct SQL to update only the changed properties. When working with raw SQL do you simply end up writing different queries for each possible permutation of changes?