Context. PHP framework Laravel offers three techniques to interact with databases, Eloquent ORM, Query builder and Raw SQL. It is important to select the right database technique when developing a web application because there are pros and cons with each approach.

 Objectives. In this thesis we will measure the performance of Raw SQL and Eloquent ORM, there is little research on which technique is faster. Intuitively, Raw SQL should be faster than Eloquent ORM, but exactly how much faster needs to be researched.

Methods. To measure the performance of both techniques, we developed a blog application and we ran database operations select, insert and update in both techniques.

Conclusions. Results indicated that overall Raw SQL performed better than Eloquent ORM in our database operations. There was a noticeable difference of average response time between Raw SQL and Eloquent ORM in all database operations. We can conclude that Eloquent ORM is good for building small to medium sized applications, where simple CRUD operations are used for the small amount of data. Typically for tasks like inserting a single row into a database or retrieving few rows from the database. Raw SQL is preferable for the applications that are dealing with huge amount of data, bulk data loads and complex queries.