[The_Colonel]

I guess this is a point where terminology matters. If you work with SQL database in an OOP language, you pretty much always do some object-relational mapping, no matter if you have a big framework or just raw SQL connection.

But this is not what people usually call as ORMs. All the "bad kind of ORM" (JPA impls, Entity Framework, SQLAlchemy, Doctrine, Active Record...) have some concept of an entity session which is tracking the entities being processed. To me, this is a central feature of an ORM, one of its major benefits. It is, incidentally, also serving as a transaction-scoped cache.

I won't of course dispute that you can have caching on other levels as well (which may perform differently, for different use cases).