There are different ways of using jOOQ, some of them being more like an ORM (but still more low-level than Hibernate) and others less so. You can use the API in

There are different ways of using jOOQ, some of them being more like an ORM (but still more low-level than Hibernate) and others less so. You can use the API in such a way that it just returns a general tuple object holding the result from your query (called Record1<T>, Record2<T1, T2>, etc.). This is especially useful when fetching from multiple tables. You can also use codegen to auto-create POJOs and mapping code, but this is not required.