At its core, an ORM is a tool that bridges object-oriented programming and relational databases. Instead of manually writing SQL queries to interact with a database, an ORM allows you to work with database records using programming language objects.
For example, in Python with SQLAlchemy:
class User(Base):
__tablename__ = 'users'
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
name = Column(String)
This maps the users table to a User class, letting you interact with it like a regular Python object.