I can’t comment on your experience either but I can say that IME Hibernate doesn’t play well with others. You end up with all these cache problems that you have to mop up, and interop either becomes super fragile or you disable the cache and the app becomes very slow.

Maybe that’s hibernate, maybe we were just Holding It Wrong, but whatever the reason - we spent a lot more time writing Hibernate code and a lot less time working on domain logic than I was comfortable with (the “blue flame” of a couple of recent comments on other posts)

For me the clincher came when I started using stored functions for business logic. There is so much less duplication (entity objects etc) and you can call the logic from any language, including the SQL CLI.

FWIW I am not at all opposed to libraries that help me work with SQL, but these days I want any tool I use to be very close to the database.