It’s fine to pick at my comments, that’s what HN is for! I accept that when I said “you get to throw away...” I was being a bit glib. I meant that we write the

It’s fine to pick at my comments, that’s what HN is for! I accept that when I said “you get to throw away...” I was being a bit glib. I meant that we write the DDL, run it, and despite it being stored in the database as structure, that DDL is never used again by JPA and you have to rewrite it in annotations. I thought lack of knowledge about indexes was an issue because I had a use case where the generated SQL was (very) sub optimal and thought it was due to an assumption made by JPA, but someone pointed out that maybe I used a Set instead of a List. I still think that’s stupid (it’s hardly fixing the “impedance mismatch” when which is the very purpose of JPA), but might not be index related. That said, knowledge about indexes does impact the design of handwritten queries and JPA doesn’t have that; JPA queries can be overly complex, and even pathological, so again I think the point holds up. In my defence I was listing a lot of issues. I feel like I could write a book on the problems with JPA but all I had was this tiny box on my phone. In terms of scaring people off, that is definitely my intent. There are lots of great ways to get Java talking to SQL, many linked to in this thread, and IMO the majority of developers would be better off choosing almost any alternative over JPA.