I find it kind of interesting that the first comment on the article says they wouldn't be able to answer the questions by they use an ORM. I'm not really a fan of ORMs, personally, because I don't think it's useful to try and "map" a relational model onto an object-oriented one.
There are some really good SQL libraries out there that make it easy to compose SQL and some of them also include an ORM built on top of the basic abstraction.
SQLAlchemy is a great example of this, I always get precisely the SQL query I would've written myself, except it's syntactically correct, easy to compose and has a chance of being portable.
