Tayo Koleoso - Beginning jOOQ: Learn to Write Efficient and Effective Java-Based SQL Database Operations

I was a data access purist: I like my DAOs chilled, my PreparedStatements prepared, and my SQL handwritten with the care and tenderness of a lover... The world moved on to Hibernate, Java Persistence API (JPA), and everything in between... I still believe in raw SQL a well-crafted SQL statement will outperform Object-Relational Mapping (ORM).

A tall, dark, dashing young and cool man, with flowing locks of jet black hair and piercing brown eyes

That tall drink of SQL? Probably me; I dont know. The point is I deeply appreciate Structured Query Language (SQL) and all it has to offer. The industrys been going gaga about NoSQL because its easy to use and it scales quickly, but the fact of the matter is that SQL is still the undisputed king of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) . When you want sanity and integrity in your data, SQL is there. When you want (most of) the guarantees of reliable transaction handling ( la ACID), youre still going to need solid SQL in your stack. Not for nothing, database stored procedures will typically outperform application-layer (e.g., Java, .Net) processing in many cases. In the words of the late, great Thanos: SQL is inevitable. Its in the interests of your applications scalability and correctness to get it right.

Unfortunately, SQL gets very short shrift from devs nowadays. The database is just another black box that were supposed to yell commands at, so it yields some data and then we move on. Its not until our queries progressively degrade due to preventable problems; our schema is an incoherent mess after two versions of our applications; SQL injection attacks expose our weaknesses; the application chokes on queries returning more than a few hundred rows. One of the dark sides of SQL is that youre not likely to realize that your SQL query is returning incorrect or incomplete data at first glance. You ran a query, it returned some queries, and thats that, right? Yikes.

This book isnt about the fundamentals of SQL. Or even the joys of SQL per se (there are many). This book is about taking a different look at handling SQL work in Java.