Anorm is a module in Play that supports interactions with the database using a plain SQL.
Anorm exposes methods to query the SQL database and parse the result as Scala objects, built in as well as custom.
The objective behind Anorm as stated on the Play website (https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.3.x/ScalaAnorm) is:
Using JDBC is a pain, but we provide a better API
We agree that using the JDBC API directly is tedious, particularly in Java. You have to deal with checked exceptions everywhere and iterate over and over around the ResultSet to transform this raw dataset into your own data structure.
We provide a simpler API for JDBC; using Scala you don't need to bother with exceptions, and transforming data is really easy with a functional language. In fact, the goal of the Play Scala SQL access layer is to provide several APIs to effectively transform JDBC data into other Scala structures.
You don't need another DSL to access relational databases
SQL is already the best DSL...