Chapter 1. Using Hibernate

Working with object-oriented software and a relational database can be cumbersome and time consuming in today's enterprise environments. Hibernate is an object/relational mapping tool for Java environments. The term object/relational mapping (ORM) refers to the technique of mapping a data representation from an object model to a relational data model with a SQL-based schema.

Hibernate not only takes care of the mapping from Java classes to database tables (and from Java data types to SQL data types), but also provides data query and retrieval facilities. It can also significantly reduce development time otherwise spent with manual data handling in SQL and JDBC.

Hibernate's goal is to relieve the developer from 95 percent of common data persistence related programming tasks. Hibernate may not be the best solution for data-centric applications that only use stored-procedures to implement the business logic in the database, it is most useful with object-oriented domain models and business logic in the Java-based middle-tier. However, Hibernate can certainly help you to remove or encapsulate vendor-specific SQL code and will help with the common task of result set translation from a tabular representation to a graph of objects.

If you have questions, use the user forum linked on the Hibernate website. We also provide a JIRA issue tracking system for bug reports and feature requests. If you are interested in the development of Hibernate, join the developer mailing list. If you are interested in translating this documentation into your language, contact us on the developer mailing list.