I may be wrong but I think that not updating hibernate/gorm leaves you stuck on Java 11 and not being able to update past that, and a lot of other dependencies are pushing past Java 11 at this point.

For what its worth, I'm not aware of any problems running Hibernate 5/GORM on newer versions of Java. The problem is usually the other way around (as you mention, when dependencies have updated their Java baseline).

So, assuming what @mattias_reichel is saying is true, which sounds very very very possible to me :) , an updated version of Grails (Groovy 4, Gradle 8, latest Spring Boot) without Micronaut (or with an optional Micronaut) and with the actual GORM could be our Grails 7. Innovation on relational databases is slow, it’s a consolidated technology, we would be fine with the current GORM for now 👍🏻 (and for ten years from now I would bet on it)

I’m considering upgrading Hibernate to 6.2 in Grace 2023.0, that’s going to be a lot of work, and may not be backwards compatible

@Michael Yan I am the last one who wants to discourage you, but… think twice before to start :) The improvements in hibernate 6 are not a breakthrough. Instead I would just love to see a backport of some features of Grace to the current Grails: the updated Groovy, Spring and Gradle dependencies & related code. This by itself would be enough for a 7.0 release.