A Question
A lot of cyber ink has been spilled about the problem of connecting models in Java code with models in relational (SQL) databases. The topic of object-relational mappings (ORMs), is indeed rich, and the full scope of things you might want to do to transfer information between an application and a database is enormous. Many ORM tools attempt to cover as much of that space as they possibly can; their designs and implementations provide for a great deal of flexibility and they are packed with features.
Of course, to achieve that flexibility, they are burdened with complexity. This is not their fault: Java and SQL are quite different worlds and covering all (or even many) of the ways to pull them together is intrinsically complex. What about a different approach? What if instead of designing an ORM tool to handle a wide variety of object and schema models and all the accompanying use-cases, an ORM tool was designed with some assumptions in mind about how objects and schemas look and work and how they are used? How simple could an ORM tool be?