this is pretty close to the sweet spot for me. being able to map rows to object easily + being able to easily compose queries are what i want from my 'ORM'. if your SQL layer doesn't support chaining conditions you end up writing it anyway so being able to do .and(condition).and(condition).and(condition), etc is pretty useful. ActiveRecord in rails comes close to this but it also manages relationships as well which makes things a bit more complicated but not as complicated as what hibernate or other ORMs do.