persistence-library-selection.md

Tech selection for database persistence

Question: Which database persistence library to use?

Options:

1. Spring Data JPA with Hibernate
2. jOOQ
3. Spring JdbcTemplate

Decision

Use jOOQ

Reasons

• JPA and Spring Data JPA libraries are very powerful but need good expertise to use them properly
• There is a good chance to misuse JPA, especially while doing anything beyond simple CRUD
• jOOQ provides TypeSafe DSL to perform database operations
• jOOQ doesn't do any magic behind the scenes. jOOQ will exactly execute the query that you tell it to execute.
• With MULTISET feature, loading *-to-Many associations are also easy

Consequences

• With jOOQ it may take a little bit more time to write code compared to JPA, but you won't lose hair debugging JPA issues later :-)
• There could possibly be more effort to switch to a different database compared to JPA