Agreed. The working approach is: Use Hibernate (or any other ORM) so that you only need to write the SQL that matters. There is nothing wrong with using a too

Agreed. The working approach is: Use Hibernate (or any other ORM) so that you only need to write the SQL that matters. There is nothing wrong with using a tool to make your life easier, and there is a lot of necessary-but-borderline-boilerplate work that needs to be done when interacting with a database: validation, caching, transaction management, etc. An ORM can handle the 90% use case for these things, freeing the programmer to focus on the 10% where the business value actually lives. Using an advanced tool doesn't remove the need to understand what is going on under the hood: it just eliminates the need to care about the inner workings until they interfere with solving the problem-at-hand.