Hibernate is my daily business. And it bugs me. Hibernate adds non-trivial complexity to your application and restricts the flexibility in terms of the query capabilities and the class design. Fortunately, there are many alternatives available. In this post, I like to recap some drawbacks of Hibernate and present an alternative: Do-it-yourself ORM with plain SQL, Spring’s JdbcTemplate and compact mapping code powered by Kotlin.

Auto increment IDs are not working well when it comes to distributed databases. Instead, we should use UUIDs. Let’s consider the pros and cons of UUIDs and how we can use them with Hibernate and MySQL.