It depends on the nature of your project. Using JPA as a default is probably a bit of a historic issue. For a lot of time (2005-2010), Hibernate has been the de-facto standard way to access RDBMS from Java, unrightfully so in many cases that would have really fared much better with a SQL-based solution, not an ORM-based one. I&#x27;m talking about reporting, analytics, complex queries (outside of reporting), data-centric middle ware, batch processing, i.e. everything that isn&#x27;t plain old CRUD.<p>While Spring also often defaults to JPA, it isn&#x27;t required at all to use JPA with Spring. Spring has always included JdbcTemplate, a JDBC extension for convenience when working with plain SQL.<p>Apart from that, jOOQ is part of the Spring Boot manual. It cannot be feel that unnatural :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.spring.io&#x2F;spring-boot&#x2F;docs&#x2F;current&#x2F;reference&#x2F;html&#x2F;boot-features-jooq.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.spring.io&#x2F;spring-boot&#x2F;docs&#x2F;current&#x2F;reference&#x2F;ht...</a>