When writing any non-trivial application, database access is a must, and there's a myriad of options for abstracting away the database. For many of those, though, you get abstractions at the cost of transparency. "Why did JPA generate that query?" "Why isn't this join working?" "Why isn't the query executing?" Fortunately, there _is_ a library that gives you full access to the power and flexibility of SQL while also you giving you Java-friendly APIs. Type-safe queries? ✓ Executing stored procedures? ✓ ActiveRecords? ✓ All of this and more is possible using JOOQ. In this session, we'll see how to get started with JOOQ, take a quick survey of its features, and end with a demo application letting JOOQ sell itself.