I'm developing a new Java web application and I'm exploring new ways (new for me!) to persist the data. I mostly have experience with JPA & Hibernate but, except for simple cases, I think this kind of full ORM can become quite complex. Plus, I don't like working with them that much. I'm looking for a new solution, probably closer to SQL.

The solutions I'm currently investigating :

MyBatis

JOOQ

Plain SQL/JDBC, potentially with DbUtils or some other basic utility libraries.

But there are two use cases I'm worrying about with those solutions, compared to Hibernate. I'd like to know what are the recommended patterns for those use cases.

Use Case 1 - Fetching an entity and accessing some of its associated children and grandchildren entities.

Let's say I have a Person entity. This Person has an associated Address entity. This Address has an associated City entity. This City entity has a name property.

entity.

The full path to access the name of the city, starting from the person entity, would be :

person.address.city.name

Now, let's say I load the Person entity from a PersonService , with this method :

public Person findPersonById(long id) { // ... }

Using Hibernate, the entities associated to the Person could be lazily loaded, on demand, so it would be possible to access person.address.city.name and be sure I have access to this property (as long as all the entities in that chain are not nullable).

But using anyone of the 3 solutions I'm investigating, it's more complicated. With those solutions, what are the recommended patterns to take care of this use case? Upfront, I see 3 possible patterns:

All the required associated children and grandchildren entities could be eagerly loaded by the SQL query used. But the issue I see with this solution is that there may be some other code that needs to access other entities/properties paths from the Person entity. For example, maybe some code will need access to person.job.salary.currency . If I want to reuse the findPersonById() method I already have, the SQL query will then need to load more information! Not only the associated address->city entity but also the associated job->salary entity. Now what if there are 10 other places that need to access other information starting from the person entity? Should I always eagerly load all the potentially required information? Or maybe have 12 different service methods to load a person entity? : findPersonById_simple(long id) findPersonById_withAdressCity(long id) findPersonById_withJob(long id) findPersonById_withAdressCityAndJob(long id) ... But then everytime I would use a Person entity, I would have to know what has been loaded with it and what hasn't... It could be quite cumbersome, right? In the getAddress() getter method of the Person entity, could there be a check to see if the address has already been loaded and, if not, lazily load it? It this a frequently used pattern in real life applications? Are there other patterns that can be used to make sure I can access the entities/properties I need from a loaded Model?

Use Case 2 - Saving an entity and making sure its associated and modified entities are also saved.

I want to be able to save a Person entity using this PersonService 's method :

public void savePerson(Person person) { // ... }

If I have a Person entity and I change person.address.city.name to something else, how can I make sure the City entity modifications will be persisted when I save the Person ? Using Hibernate, it can be easy to cascade the save operation to the associated entities. What about the solutions I'm investigating?

Should I use some kind of dirty flag to know what associated entities also have to be saved when I save the person? Are there any other known patterns useful to deal with this use case?

Update : There is a discussion about this question on the JOOQ forum.