title: What are the advantages of using an ORM?
body: <p>As a web developer looking to move from hand-coded PHP sites to framework-based sites, I have seen a lot of discussion about the advantages of one ORM over another. It seems to be useful for projects of a <em>certain (?)</em> size, and even more important for enterprise-level applications.</p>
  
  <p>What does it give me as a developer? How will my code differ from the individual SELECT statements that I use now? How will it help with DB access and security? How does it find out about the DB schema and user credentials? </p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong> <em>@duffymo pointed out what should have been obvious to me: ORM is only useful for OOP code. My code is not OO, so I haven't run into the problems that ORM solves.</em></p>