We're using knex.js, so we're not messing around with database cursors (we get an array of objects), and we don't have to write out the columns for inserts/updates. We also sometimes use the knex query builder for super trivial selects from a single table.

But for anything more complex than that (e.g. SELECT queries joining several tables) we're using knex.raw so the query itself is raw SQL where we're very much thinking in the relational model rather than in terms of objects.