Thanks for sharing that. I completely agree with your assessments. My motivation was similar, mainly fighting with Hibernate/JPQL and wanting something simpler that was structured the natural bottom-up way an SQL query would be written. Another thing that ORMs don't do well is avoiding N+1 queries when you're already starting with N of something that have associations. I started SafeQL to see where it could go but have yet to do any code generation which is what it needs to be usably convenient. Also haven't ventured much into complex UPDATEs or UPSERTs.