I come from, what some may think as an old school, the development environment where a lot of SQL is hand-coded and well tuned. So, to me using a generic framework that can understand the database schema based on some meta-data and automatically translate a generic syntax into the target database is a bit concerning. I have done performance tuning on Oracle, MySQL, SQLite and Derby and my experience had been that, while abstracting the SQL generation such that the same SQL definition can run on all of these databases is probably not that difficult, for anything that’s more serious, such as a complex reporting SQL, not all databases behave the same way with the same form of SQL adjusting a bit for their syntactic differences. For example, check my articles MySQL COUNT DISTINCT vs DISTINCT and COUNT, SQLite Join and Group By vs Group By and Join and Experience with Derby to see how each of these databases required restructuring the SQL statements fundamentally so different, that a generic ORM (object relational mapping) such as Hibernate will not be sufficient for complex SQLs.
Depending on the application, I would say 60 to 80% of the SQLs could be very simple mostly providing the basic CRUD services and can be done using the generic frameworks. But that remaining 20 to 40% is where it may be desirable to hire database experts to hand-tune SQLs.
poeticcode 