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copied!<p>It's not that straight SQL is the devil - sometimes it's pretty much required to write raw SQL to get a query to perform the way you want it to. To me, ORMs are much more about eliminating manual work than anything else (like avoiding SQL at all costs). I just don't want to have to setup all my code objects with all hand-crafted queries for every project. That's just a ridiculous amount of work and thought. Instead, ORM tools provide a nice and automated way to create data objects that would have required a lot of manual work otherwise. Now I can have automatic individual row objects that I can extend and create custom functions for, without thinking about it. I can retrieve related rows from different tables without having to hand-code that query.</p> <p>It looks like your User class example is from <a href="http://phpdatamapper.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">phpDataMapper</a>, and if so, it also has some other built-in niceties like auto table migrations so you don't have to distribute an SQL file for your table structures as well as a few helper functions and other things. All features included intended to save you time - that's the main goal.</p> <p>The most important distinction between AR and DM is that an ActiveRecord (AR) row knows about it's own data store, and thus has saving/updating functions on each row object - $user->save() - The "record" is "active". With DataMapper (DM), on the other hand, each individual row does NOT know about it's own data store, by definition. The row is more of a dumb value object that can be worked with in your code. The mapper is responsible for translating the changes to that row back to the datastore - $mapper->save($user). That's the most significant difference - you will find most of the core ORM features to be the same in almost any implementation. It's just mostly a matter of how it's put together at the core architectural level.</p>

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