There are a thousand and one ways to get data into, and out of, a database. I confess that I am not a fan of ORMs such as Hibernate because over the long term, I think they're far more costly than writing your own SQL. ORMs are convenient during development, and they keep the code consistent, but they abstract SQL so far away that it can be difficult to diagnose what's happening when your data access isn't performing how you expect it to (whether it be performance, incorrect data retrieval, or something more sinister). Of course, ORMs have their value in the sense that they're (mostly) database agnostic, but never once in my career have I worked on anything wherein the backend database was a variable.
This being said, I also loath SQL strings in my code. They're ugly, they're hard to read, they remove much of the built-in SQL highlighting and support of many modern IDEs, they force you to create weird classes with nothing but SQL templates in them, and they just...
