I think the advice to not use an ORM* is very misguided. Use the ORM for the 80-90% of queries that are "SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=5" and "UPDATE table SET name='jim' WHERE id=5". For the rest of the queries, use your ORM's ability to run custom queries. People who have problems with ORMs are probably not using them correctly.

There was a debate on HN about ORM's a while ago, and one of the most significant comments I read was something along of the lines of "Every project I've ever worked on that 'didn't use an ORM' implemented the same functionality of one in a less-maintainable way."

* Or other object-oriented abstraction layer for database access, ORMs aren't the only option.