Most "ORM vs JDBC" discussions are opinion wars. After building and benchmarking data-access layers in Java, my takeaway is simple: you should not choose by framework brand, but by measured query behavior. In this post, I’ll share a practical checklist you can apply to any stack (Hibernate, MyBatis, JDBI, jOOQ, custom JDBC, or lightweight ORM tools). Why teams get stuck in the same loop You’ve p