Java. But to be fair to my point, both JDBC and ORMs are also variants of these kind of abstractions. :) But as you said, some of the problems were when it got

Java. But to be fair to my point, both JDBC and ORMs are also variants of these kind of abstractions. :) But as you said, some of the problems were when it got really DB specific. A simple layer that could be swapped for a simpler (and not performant, but didn't matter with little data) variant locally was nice.