> I had to learn Hibernate architecture, configuration, logging, naming strategies, tuplizers, entity name resolvers, enhanced identifier generators, identifier generator optimization, union-subclasses, XDoclet markup, bidirectional associations with indexed collections, ternary associations, idbag, mixing implicit polymorphism with other inheritance mappings, replicating object between two different datastores, detached objects and automatic versioning, connection release modes, stateless session interface, taxonomy of collection persistence, cache levels, lazy or eager fetching and many, many more.

Welcome to Java …

I generally find that an ORM makes easy things easy and difficult things indescribably hard or impossible. Honestly, the relational model is great, and it's worth understanding well. Frankly, if you're a software developer and you can't learn SQL … you're not really a software developer.