Use this tool to convert normal SQL to a CakePHP query. It will attempt to figure out the correct model names according to CakePHP conventions and highlight any potential problems with naming conventions.
The CakePHP query converter should be able to convert most SQL queries to CakePHP queries, not only MySQL but Postgress, Microsoft SQL Server and SQLite queries too.
Currently this works for most queries with any combination of FIELDS, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, ORDER BY, LIMIT and OFFSET. CakePHP does not support a few things such as UNION so those are not covered.
The query converter currently does SELECT statements, but I will update at some point with others such as UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE
For more information and what the CakePHP query converter can and cant do see the docs