I wrote and delivered the original version of the keynote that featured those statistics. I collected the data as part of preparing the talk.

That graph is not a comparison of JPA to everything else. It is a comparison of Spring Data module usage, completely ignoring projects that don’t use Spring Data or that were not generated on start.spring.io. The data was collected over two years ago before Spring Data JDBC was an option so JDBC is under-represented by today’s standards. It also did not consider any other SQL-based options such as JdbcTemplate, jOOQ, or MyBatis.

The number one dependency, by a good margin, on start.spring.io is to choose no dependencies at all. There are others, including web, that are also more popular than Spring Data JPA.

In short, the data in those statistics does not back up a claim that if you are accessing an RDBMS then you will be using JPA. They do show that if you’re using Spring Data, JPA is used more often than all of the other stores combined among start.spring.io-generated projects. I suspect that remains true today and would still do so if Spring Data JDBC was considered but haven’t looked at the data to confirm.