Idiorm is an object-relational mapper and fluent query builder. If you prefer to think about tables and joins, you should probably be using Idiorm. $user = ORM::for_table('user') ->where_equal('username', 'j4mie') ->find_one(); $user->first_name = 'Jamie'; $user->save(); $tweets = ORM::for_table('tweet') ->select('tweet.*') ->join('user', array( 'user.id', '=', 'tweet.user_id' )) ->where_equal('us