[ChrisWreck]

> I expect every single one of my backend engineers (on any tech stack) to understand the fundamentals of SQL INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements.

Understanding INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE doesn't help you very much when you have to persist changes to a single child entity of many in an aggregate (parent entity). How do you track which child has changed? Or if a new child is added? Or one is deleted? Or what if the relation is a child of a child of the aggregate, which might very well be the best way to model your domain.

In these situations, Hibernate/JPA will help you a lot! If you're doing it using plain SQL/JDBC, you'll probably end up writing your own mini ORM, and/or polluting your domain with database concerns. (I do keep my Hibernate entities separated from my domain.)

[cryptos]

Exactly this! And I'm curios to learn how to solve this update problem (in an elegant way) with pure SQL.