It depends on the nature of your project. Using JPA as a default is probably a bit of a historic issue. For a lot of time (2005-2010), Hibernate has been the de

It depends on the nature of your project. Using JPA as a default is probably a bit of a historic issue. For a lot of time (2005-2010), Hibernate has been the de-facto standard way to access RDBMS from Java, unrightfully so in many cases that would have really fared much better with a SQL-based solution, not an ORM-based one. I'm talking about reporting, analytics, complex queries (outside of reporting), data-centric middle ware, batch processing, i.e. everything that isn't plain old CRUD. While Spring also often defaults to JPA, it isn't required at all to use JPA with Spring. Spring has always included JdbcTemplate, a JDBC extension for convenience when working with plain SQL. Apart from that, jOOQ is part of the Spring Boot manual. It cannot be feel that unnatural :) https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/boot-features-jooq.html https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/ht...