ORM’s, or object-relational mappers, are a great way to convert (mostly) relational databases to classes in a object oriented language. It takes care of SO many things you do over and over again: fetch records from a table, populate an object, implement getters and setters, update or add records when needed etc. A lot of this work can be abstracted away by using patterns like ActiveRecord, table gateways and/or data mappers. An ORM will even abstract away this further as a whole and let you only deal with the resulting (domain) models. There is no immediate need to interact with any data storage of any kind. Who would not want this!?