I just stumbled upon this ticket while looking for something else.

You must definitively have a look at the Doctrine project: http://www.doctrine-project.org/

This is an excellent PHP ORM. I use it within the Symfony framework (http://www.symfony-project.org/) and it's one of the best piece of PHP software ever written in my opinion. Worth checking out!

I've used Doctrine for a project where I didn't need the CMS/templating integration of SilverStripe. It is very good, and very similar to sapphire. Lessons to be learned there I think.

Thanks for the tipp Francois - the ticket is still pretty early stage, so any input is valuable. It will be a big undertaking, with the potential to change a lot of the ways we currently use the ORM. We won't be getting into our own SQL lingo (like Doctrine with DQL), but rather try to provide fluent objectified interfaces for 95% of the tasks you would usually express in SQL.

Feel free to CC yourself into the ticket or comment on there: http://open.silverstripe.com/ticket/2986

For more info on doctrine, in case anybody's interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_(PHP)