Yes to ORM, No to custom queries. Here’s a bullet list:

1. You’d probably end up writing your own ORM anyway.
2. Doing so, you’d spend a lot of money writing library level code instead of your business logic.
3. The time tested ones are likely to be better than yours.
4. Beware, you’d have to figure out some complex issues: connection pooling, concurrency/locking, caching, transactions, updates, versioning, documentation etc.

If you find yourself ORM is falling short of what you need, you’re either presenting information overload or using a transactional database as a reporting store.

In this article, I mean ORM to be an object database mapping, so it applies to both SQL/NoSQL databases.

Disagree? I’d like to find your opinion in the comments.