Happy New Year and Welcome to 2015! As we head into the new year, let's take a look back at what have been the most popular topics of interest in the SQL Zone over this past year. We present to you here DZone's most popular SQL articles from 2014:

1. JPA Hibernate Alternatives: When JPA & Hibernate Aren't Right for Your Project - Hebert Coelho De Oliveir

   Today we will talk about situations in which the use of the JPA/Hibernate is not recommended. What problems do JPA/Hibernate present, what are some solutions, and what alternatives do we have outside of the JPA world?

2. 6 Simple Performance Tips for SQL SELECT Statements -  Mpumelelo Msimanga

   After years writing SQL statements, the author began to develop a mental check-list of things he looked at when trying to improve query performance. These are the things the author checks before moving on to query plans and reading the sometimes complicated documentation of the database he is working on.

3. ORM Is an Offensive Anti-Pattern - Yegor Bugayenko

ORM is a terrible anti-pattern that violates all principles of object-oriented programming, tearing objects apart and turning them into dumb and passive data bags. There is no excuse for ORM existence in any application...

4. NoSQL No More -  Matt Butcher

   The author works at Revolv, and right now they're just about finished with a major migration off of a NoSQL database. They're moving onto a traditional RDBMS (PostgreSQL, to be precise). Why move to an "old" technology, though? There are three main reasons.

5. 10 Reasons why Java Rocks More Than Ever -  Lukas Eder

   But why does Java rock so much? Is it the JVM? Is it the backwards-compatibility? Is it the easy syntax? Or the millions of free and commercial software available to build your software? All of this and much more.

6. CRUD Using Spring MVC 4.0 RESTful Web Services and AngularJS -  Priya Darshini

   Based on the requests from many readers, I am now presenting an article on how to make CRUD operations using Spring MVC 4.0 RESTFul web services and AngularJS. I had already written few articles on Spring MVC 4.0 RESTFul Web Services in case you are new to this.

7. Hibernate Identity, Sequence and Table (Sequence) Generator -  Vlad Mihalcea

   In my previous post I talked about different database identifier strategies. This post will compare the most common surrogate primary key strategies: IDENTITY, SEQUENCE, and TABLE (SEQUENCE).

The top articles here were chosen based on the amount of pageviews they received, but they are just the beginning of a long list of great articles we've had in the SQL Zone this year. Feel free to add in the comments what your favorite articles were this year. We're looking forward to another great year of content in the SQL Zone!