A big part of the fun of starting a new project is making a design and choosing an appropriate technology stack. If you are a Java developer and need to access a SQL database, a common choice is to use JPA with an ORM framework such as Hibernate. This adds a lot of complexity to your project for multiple reasons. In my experience, writing performing queries requires careful analysis. Writing custom queries is possible but more complex. For starters, JPQL/HQL queries are parsed at runtime and the criteria API is far from user friendly. Moreover, the extensive use of annotations makes it harder to quickly see how the database is structured.