You still need some kind of mapper though to go from the SQL results to your record type, even if it's using convention such as the records fields are named the

You still need some kind of mapper though to go from the SQL results to your record type, even if it's using convention such as the records fields are named the same as the table columns you're pulling from. I'm not arguing that for instance Hibernate is awesome, just that you need something to fill that gap, and you can do a lot worse than Hibernate, particularly within the limitation imposed by Java. Personally I prefer something like this ( http://hackage.haskell.org/package/esqueleto-1.3.4.2/docs/Database-Esqueleto.html http://hackage.haskell.org/package/esqueleto-1.3.4.2/docs/Da... ), but will usually settle for Hibernate or similar in less powerful languages like Java.