I'm kind of on the side of avoiding ORM unless you have a clear need for it. But I've seen projects where they are very valuable. If you mainly want to register, update and delete a bunch of structured data, it's not a bad idea to put it in a dabatase. And if you do those operations a lot in some part of the application, it's not a bad idea to use an ORM there. For analysis and reports and such I would probably suggest just writing SQL directly though.