I have used SQLAlchemy extensively and love it. Now I find myself a stranger in a strange land and I was wondering if anybody knew of a similarly awesome database abstraction toolkit for Java.
The best you'll find is hibernate -- http://www.hibernate.org/ . It's not exactly like SQLAlchemy because Java is statically typed, but it's better than using the Java db layer directly.
I can recommend carbonado, http://carbonado.sourceforge.net/ , if you don't want/need a full ORM, and prefer something similar to activerecord. It doesn't hide the relational model, and has just the right level of abstraction with a nice to use API.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 14.1 ms ] threadhttp://jdbi.org/ is an even lighter weight wrapper over JDBC.
If you need a full-featured ORM then http://www.hibernate.org/, or another JPA implementation, perhaps http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/ or http://www.datanucleus.org/ are worth a look.