Spring Data R2DBC's DatabaseClient provided a rich fluent API including functionality that allowed a convenient mapping of results into a particular type through as(Class). During the migration of DatabaseClient we decided to drop that functionality to provide functionality that we knew how to provide from a Spring Framework perspective. Target object mapping in Spring Data used core Spring Data functionality that isn't available on the Spring Framework level.

We see a lot of demand for a method that is convenient to use from the caller side and that applies convention-based mapping of primitives (Java primitives and R2DBC primitives) and data classes.

Right now, mapping requires a mapping function to be used through map(BiFunction<Row, RowMetadata, T>).