[kjeetgill]

Agreed! I've found JOOQ to be excellent.

Generally ORMs try to abstract away the database entirely. This is mostly fine for CRUD stuff where you really just want to persistently stash away something basic off host. If you could write perfect uncrashing programs you'd probably just keep them in memory.

As soon as you need to find things, especially based on their relationships, you'll need to be aware of what indexes you have available at least. Eventually you'll want to have control of the precise query

JOOQ lets you compose queries programmatically without really hindering you from producing any query you want but not forcing you to glue strings together either.