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ActiveJDBC

An ActiveRecord-pattern ORM for Java that stays out of your way. No session, no detached entities, no proxies ? just objects that know how to talk to the database.

What it is

A small, honest ORM

ActiveJDBC is what you reach for when Hibernate feels like too much ceremony and raw JDBC feels like not enough. It implements the ActiveRecord pattern faithfully ? your model class *is* the database row, and the same object does reads, writes, and validations.

It's intentionally small: a few hundred kilobytes of JAR, no dependency avalanche, no annotations-as-programming-language. The tradeoff is honest: it's an ORM, not an architecture. If that's what you want, you'll love it.

Why we reach for it

  • Active Record pattern, done right for the JVM
  • Tiny footprint and fast startup
  • Works cleanly with migrations and raw SQL when you need it
  • Battle-tested on large, real databases
Docs and source

Apache-2.0 on GitHub

Need help integrating ActiveJDBC?

We use it on most of our Java builds. Happy to help yours get on rails.

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