I really really like what jOOQ has done for SQL under Java (and other JVM languages). It's basically a type safe interface to SQL that anyone who knows SQL can

I really really like what jOOQ has done for SQL under Java (and other JVM languages). It's basically a type safe interface to SQL that anyone who knows SQL can grok in minutes and it provides constructs to help bridge the gap between SQL and the programming language. Among other features it has tools to help migrate between different databases (and more are planned) - something that is usually considered to be a strong point of ORMs. I've used a couple of ORMs and jOOQ blows them all away easily. It's not the first product that tried this approach but jOOQ does it really well. I've partly or fully converted at least 3 Hibernate projects to jOOQ and all my recent JVM projects use it exclusively. In my opinion products like jOOQ make ORMs redundant for most use cases.