If you need a fully fledged ORM, you can use Spring Data JPA with Hibernate which is really easy to get started quickly and works very well with Spring Boot. I use a library called JOOQ (Java Object Oriented Query) which allows you to write type safe SQL and provides you with code generation features. It also gives you basic CRUD. Also I use flyway for migrations.
I work as a staff software engineer at a med tec company. We are mainly programming in C++ but my background is also a functional one (Haskell, OCaml).
In the past I did research in program analysis.
Great timing. I was just experimenting with Spring Boot.
Any tips on connecting a database to store and retrieve model objects?
Hibernate is a good option.
You could also use spring JDBC. Explore both and check :)
If you need a fully fledged ORM, you can use Spring Data JPA with Hibernate which is really easy to get started quickly and works very well with Spring Boot. I use a library called JOOQ (Java Object Oriented Query) which allows you to write type safe SQL and provides you with code generation features. It also gives you basic CRUD. Also I use flyway for migrations.
Just have a look at the official guides.
spring.io/guides/
There is one for relational database access (spring.io/guides/gs/relational-dat...) and for others as well.