Except this project takes the SQL approach, not the UNIX approach, and the most popular SQL API is JDBC. Also, I don't know if ORMs are still popular, but their original goal had little to do with simplifying SQL and a lot to do with trying (unsuccessfully) to reconcile the relational model with the OO model, and to save application developers the need to do the translation manually.

This project currently has a proprietary C++ API, so why not standardize with JDBC (at least for those making use of the JVM)?