[srnm]

I can recommend carbonado, http://carbonado.sourceforge.net/ , if you don't want/need a full ORM, and prefer something similar to activerecord. It doesn't hide the relational model, and has just the right level of abstraction with a nice to use API.

http://jdbi.org/ is an even lighter weight wrapper over JDBC.

If you need a full-featured ORM then http://www.hibernate.org/, or another JPA implementation, perhaps http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/ or http://www.datanucleus.org/ are worth a look.