I spent all of yesterday reading various articles/tutorials on Hibernate and although I am blown-away by how powerful it is, I have one major concern with it.
It seems that the standard practice is to allow Hibernate to design/generate your DB schema for you, which is a new and scary concept that I am choking on. From the tutorials I read, you just add a new entity to your hibernate.cfg.xml config file, annotate any POJO you want with #Entity, and voila - Hibernate creates the tables for you. Although this is very cool, it has me wondering about a handful of scenarios:
What if you already have a DB schema and the one Hibernate wants to generate for you does not conform to it? What if you have a crazy DBA that refuses to budge on the pre-defined (non-Hibernate) schema?
What if you have reference tables with tens of thousands of records in it (like all the cities in the world)? Would you have to instantiate and save() tens of thousands of unique POJOs or is there a way to configure Hibernate so it will honor and not overwrite data already existing in your tables?
What if you want to do perf tuning on your schema/tables? This includes indexing, normalizing above and beyond what Hibernate creates automatically?
What if you want to add constraints or triggers to your tables? Indexes?
I guess at the root of this is the following:
It looks like Hibernate creates and forces a particular schema/config on your DB. I am wondering how this agenda will conflict with our platform standards, our DBA philosophies, and our ability to perf tune/tweak tables that Hibernate interacts with.
Thanks in advance.
I think you're attributing too much power to Hibernate.
Hibernate does have an idiom that may influence database implementation.
Hibernate does not generate a schema for you unless you ask it to do so. It's possible to start with an existing schema and map it to Java objects using Hibernate. But it might not be possible or optimal if the schema conflicts with Hibernate requirements.
If the DBA won't budge - as they shouldn't - or Hibernate can't accomodate you, then you have your answer: you can't use Hibernate.
Your DBA might consent, but your app might find that the dynamic SQL that's generated for you by Hibernate isn't what you want.
Fortunately for you, it's not the only game in town.
I don't think implementations have to be all or none. If you use simple JDBC to access reference data, what's the harm?
Database design considerations should be independent of Hibernate. Constraints, triggers, normalization, and indexes should be driven by business needs, not your middleware choices.
If you don't have a solid object model, or the schema can't accomodate it, then you should reconsider Hibernate. There's straight JDBC, stored procedures, Spring JDBC, and iBatis as alternatives.
Hibernate comes with a default way to map objects to tables - like several tools/libraries, it favours convention over configuration for simplicity.
However, if you want to map the entities to database tables differently, you can explicitly tell Hibernate how these are mapped (from simple attributes such as changing the table name, through to redefining the foreign-key relationships between related entities and how this is persisted).
If you do this correctly, you don't need to instantiate and save existing data, as this would be pointless - the database already contains the information about the entities in exactly the form that Hibernate understands. (Think about it - to load and then immediately save an entity should always be a no-op, and so can be skipped altogether.)
So the short answer to your question is "no". If you don't care for designing tables, you can let Hibernate adopt a reasonable default. If you do want to design your schema explicitly though, you can do this and then describe that exact schema to Hibernate.
As someone who's worked on java and hibernate in the enterprise for a long time, I have seen very few projects which use this capability. You'll see some build tools and other things do this, but for a real enterprise app, i've never seen this.
Most DBA's won't let the application user create tables. They rely on a privileged user to do those things, and the user that the app connects as would have r/w privs on the data but not the schema itself.
As a result, you write the SQL yourself, and you do the hibernate mappings to match. It doesn't mean your object design won't influence your SQL, but you should still always create your schema upfront.
No. You can use hibernate tools to generate the entities from existing database.
There are 2 ways you can go about in using Hibernate. If you have good DBA or database designer, then it is better to design the database and then map it into hibernate.
On the other hand if you don't have DBA and have good developer then let Hibernate generate Database for you.
The concept behind Hibernate is to map Database and the Objects. So it is called as ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool.
Read here for Object Relational Impedance.
This is the preferred way for a quick'n dirty prototype or a simple tutorial, but it's far from being the preferred way for any production application. I largely prefer designing the database independently, using scripts to generate the schema, tables, views, indexes, etc., and map the schema to entities.
As long as the mapping finds the tables and columns in the database, everything is fine.
As soon as you have data in your database and the schema must change, you'll have to write migration scripts anyway. You can't just drop everything and restart from scratch. The tutorials are written for developers starting with Hibernate and who must discover Hibernate as quick as possible, without dealing with complex SQL scripts.
What if you already have a DB schema ...
I don't know where you get that impression. Hibernate can use existing schema. It is quite flexible.
What if you have reference tables ...
Make the relationship LAZY, and it won't load automatically. Only changed object will be saved.
What if you want to do perf tuning ...
Just don't use the generated schema. It is just a starting point. You can customize as you need.
What if you want to add constraints or triggers to your tables? Indexes?
Some as above.
You can use hibernate with an existing database schema.
You can use various annotations to map to existing tables and columns, for example:
#Table(name = "dbschema.dbTable") - should be placed before your class file to map it
#Column(name = "colName") - to map a column
Just be sure that the hibernate is configured with this option:
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update
If you set this to create it will create the schema, so do not do this in your case.
Use hibernate/jpa when appropiate. A common practice when designing apps is to extract the draft and alter it manually after needs (indices etc). However, it will be a pain for you if you change the db layout from hibernate way to do things. Lots of the beauty of JPA will be lost. For tasks which require heavy performance tuning and full control - just go for reguar jdbc.
Some answers:
A. It is possible to add an index annotation : see the table annotation.
B. If you have reference tables, you may choose to have lazy fetching or eager fetching (i.e - if your tables represent a person and a its books - whether to load a person without its book, or with its books)
C. Hibernate can be used to work on existing schema. The schema might not be trivial to work with , but as other have said, you should design db only according to business needs, and not according to framework conventions
D. I would like to encourage you also to read what hibernate does "under the hood" - it uses lots of usage of proxies, which hurts performance, you must understand well the scope of session , and the usages of 1st level and 2nd level cache .
E. Following what I wrote at section D - working with triggers will cause your DB to change "under the hood" when it comes to hibernate. Consider a case where updating a record will create (using a trigger) an entry in some archiving table , and let's say this table is also annotated via hibernate - your hibernate caching will not be aware of the change that happend outside of the application scope.
F. It is important to me to state that I'm not against Hibernate, but you should not use it for all solutions, this is a mistake I did in the past. I now work with Spring-JDBC and I'm quite pleased (for our application needs it will be hard to use Hibernate, and I assume we will consider this only in the case we need to support more than one DB flavor).
Related
I have a question about architecture of my project.
I need to create 10 apis rest, but my database has 300 tables around without relationship.
My question is: It's necessary create all entities from my database?
What is the best practice? Generator Hibernate?
It's necessary create all entities from my database?
It's NOT necessary to generate all entities. For your use case, filter out the tables which are going to be in use by 10 rest APIs and create entities only for these tables. The list may include 5, 10 or 30 tables (count doesn't matter). To be more precise, you only need to create entities against tables on which you intend to work directly or indirectly for these endpoints.
What is the best practice? Generator Hibernate?
Almost always, entities generated by hibernate generator are good start but most often than not, generated entities are far from perfect (or near perfect). As an example, a joiner table in db usually end up being a separate Entity. Feel free to use hibernate entity generator for tables you need (yes, you can specify handful tables using "Table Filters") but I'll strongly advise to revisit all generated entities and tune them as per your specific needs. I personally prefer to hand-code entities myself instead of using generator, especially if the entities are handful.
With regard to best modeling techniques, that's a vast topic and I'll suggest to start with hibernate official documentation. While the documentation focus on hibernate specifics, it talks about various modeling techniques in hibernate feature context and which one is suited for which purpose. You may also want to look at JPA tutorials OR even spring-data-jpa for that matter.
Hope it helps!!
Which is better when using JPA, especially when starting a new project?
Start with designing entities and then let JPA generate the database or
Start with the database schema and let tools generate entity classes?
im part of a small company. im both the software developer and DBA. i have complete freedom for the application and db design
im just starting the project
If you want to design a database, then start with the schema. If you want to write software, then start with the entities. The point of an ORM is to let you think about an object model without having to worry about the database that stores it, so questions of this type actually confuse the issue somewhat by insinuating crossover between the realms. Are you a software developer or a DBA? That, much more than the fact that you're using JPA, is what will determine the correct answer for you.
Um - neither? The power of JPA is that you don't have to generate one from the other! Generation of entities or database schema might be a good starting place if you have one already in place; but the generated stuff is not something you will want to use long term.
You cannot simply design one side of the mapping without any consideration of the other. If you will share the database with other applications, you will need to give more weight to the database schema. If your application has a complex model, you will want to focus on the object model first, allowing it to be driven by the use cases you uncover as you develop your application.
I tend to start with the object model first (even without a backing database to start) because that allows me to see the application in action earlier and get a feel for what we really want to build. But integration with the database must happen earlier rather than later; as its constraints will quickly impose themselves on your object model. :-)
It depends on one's needs . Usually in a product development environment , there are different teams which work on database design , interface design and implementation . So in that case , you have no option than generating the JPA entities from the already database design.
Secondly , if you are starting from the scratch and you know what are you upto then you can probably start writing your own entities (java class) and then generate the database from that.
Better go for database Scheme. Because some of the features r not available in JPA generated database.In JPA We cant give default values for our column. Check HERE for the allowable attributes in JPA.
Its upto you. whether to go top-down or bottom up approach. In case this schema would be exclusive to your application, see how your team members and analysts understand ORM or DB. In my experience analysts are better understand in terms of tables. But if they are good to discuss in terms of classes or UML diagrams go with JPA. Also, take into consideration views of your DBA and build engineer.
If you have complete flexibility and are not restricted to a DB schema and want a clean object model in your java application then start with with the model first and generate the schema from the model. This also allows you to generate clean JSON representations from the clean model to serve as on-the-wire format for your objects using technologies like Jackson (or GSON).
Doing DB Schema first and reverse engineering model classes from it will result in relational concepts seeping into your model classes resulting in poor (polluted) model.
In summary do model first unless your hands are tied and you must map to some existing schema.
I am in need of some further information.
I am developing a small application which will be interacting with a PHP web application. The media server which we are incorporating with is extensible in Java.
I need very little access to the database inside the plugin which we are developing, I only need to view rows in about 10% of the tables. I only need to update data in 1 of the tables.
The schema as a whole is littered with foreign keys, but currently (and there is little chance this changes in the future) I do not need to modify any other information in the databse except for the one column (which is not a foreign key).
I don't really want to model all of these relationships -- as there is no need to.
What is my best bet? Will Hibernate make me map all of these domain objects? Is myBatis (formerly iBATIS) a better choice as the people I am handing off too are more comfortable with SQL? Does it matter which persistence framework I choose -- i.e. are they all going to make me model each of the tables?
These are mySQL InnoDB tables if it makes any difference.
Hibernate only requires you to map those items which you want to use within the context of your Java application. As a result, you can have objects only mapped to those tables which you desire access from the Java side.
A few caveats for the process though:
You will have to model all objects/relationships for all tables with which a given entity table will interact
Things could be messy with two programs hitting the database at the same time. While this is an issue that is accounted for and handled by Hibernate for locking, such things tend to fall by the wayside in PHP.
I can't really speak about Hibernate, but myBatis won't make you model anything - just create a POJO that contains the properties that you care about, then write mappings (in just straight sql) that map whatever columns from whatever tables you want into your pojo.
With Hibernate, you only need to model the objects you will be working with, and the ddl2hbm tool may be able to generate the Java classes for you based on the existing database, depending on if there are foreign keys linking to models you will not be using.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
For our new product re-engineering, we are in the process of selecting the best framework from Java. As the consideration is to go for database agnostic approach for model, we are working on options between Struts + Spring with iBATIS or Hibernate. Please advice which is best as both offer persistence.
iBATIS and Hibernate are quite different beasts.
The way I tend to look at it is this: Hibernate works better if your view is more object-centric. If however you view is more database-centric then iBATIS is a much stronger choice.
If you're in complete control of your schema and you don't have an extremely high throughput requirement then Hibernate can work quite well. The object model makes for fairly convenient code but at a huge complexity cost.
If you're dealing with a "legacy" database schema where you need to write fairly complicated SQL queries then chances are iBATIS will work better.
HQL (Hibernate Query Language) is another language you'll have to learn and even then you'll probably find cases where you still need to write SQL. What's more, chances are you will at some spend half a day figuring out the right combination of XML, properties, annotations, etc to get Hibernate to generate a performant SQL query.
There is no universal "A is better than B" answer for this question.
Consider what you're trying to achieve. Typically, the Command Query Response Segregation
model works well for complex domains.
The reason is that you're trying to do one of two things typically:
Create/Update/Delete some complex domain entities
Run analytic fetch queries (i.e. summation/aggregation queries)
Hibernate works well for case 1 allowing you to just make a POJO and persist/update it. It also does this quickly, unless your domain is quite large.
myBatis is great for fetch queries (case 2) where you just want an answer. Hibernate would attempt to load the entire object graph and you'd need to start tuning queries with LazyLoading tricks to keep it working on a large domain. Conversely if you just want some analytic POJO page, the myBatis implementation of the same query would be trivial.
Because of this, myBatis is faster than Hibernate at SELECTS.
These two cases are the difference between Commands where you want to change the domain data and Responses where you just want to fetch some data.
So, consider these two cases and what your application does. If you have a simple domain and just fetch information, use myBatis. If you have a complex domain and persist entities, use Hibernate. If you do both, consider a hybrid approach. That's what we use on our project that has thousands of entities to keep it under control. ;)
ORM vs persistence framework
Hibernate is object-relation mapping framework (ORM) which maps Java classes to database tables. MyBatis is persistence framework - not ORM. It maps SQL statements to Java methods.
Database schema
Hibernate can create or validate database schema according to your Java model while MyBatis does not have such feature. Also it is convenient for testing environment when you're using in-memory DB. Related discussions:
Can MyBatis create the database schema?
Cache
Hibernate has first level cache which is impossible to disable. It means that if you query item through ORM and then delete it directly with SQL, it stays in the cache. You can explicitly clear the cache to get the most updated results from database. Related discussions:
Do Jpa& Hibernate load data which changes asynchronously in DB?
What are First and Second Level caching in Hibernate?
Optimistic lock management
Also there are differences for optimistic lock management:
MyBatis doesn't support optimistic concurrency control natively,
unlike ORM tools like Hibernate/JPA with the #Version annotation.
Related discussions:
Optimistic concurrency control
How to prevent concurrency issue in UPDATE via iBatis
Lazy loading
Hibernate will try to load entire object graph except objects which are marked for lazy loading. myBatis will load data according a SQL query. Lazy loading may improve performance but it may cause connection leaks if it used with
<property name="hibernate.enable_lazy_load_no_trans" value="true" />
properties. Related discussions:
org.hibernate.LazyInitializationException - could not initialize proxy - no Session
Solve Hibernate Lazy-Init issue with hibernate.enable_lazy_load_no_trans
Hibernate Session management
Entities operations like saving, updating or deleting are performed via Hibernate Session. It requires good understanding how to implement proper Hibernate Session management strategy to avoid detached entity passed to persist and other phenomenons related to Hibernate.
Sometimes it may take more time trying to understand underlying Hibernate behavior than add a little bit more work and write raw SQL statements for myBatis.
Cascading
Hibernate provides cascading, orphan removal and other features for object graphs while they not present in myBatis - to implement them you'll need to write SQL queries explicitly.
Queries
In myBatis you'll write almost plain SQL queries. Hibernate has multiple options to form query: SQL, HQL, Criteria API. Sometimes it may be suitable to use Criteria API when you have many optional fields in criteria. It would provide more structured approach to form query and maybe avoid related mistakes.
Cletus did a great job at summarizing this comparison. Hibernate works well when you control the data model and is more object-centric while iBATIS works well when you need to integrate with an existing database and is more data-centric.
Also I think that Hibernate has a bit more of learning curve. With iBATIS, it's pretty easy to know what is going on while more "magic" happens with Hibernate. In other words, newbies might find iBatis easier to use and to understand.
But I'm not saying that you should prefer iBatis, iBatis and Hibernate are just different as said above.
And by the way, if you go for Hibernate, maybe consider using standardized JPA and EJB 3.0 (JSR-220) object/relational mapping annotations provided by Hibernate Annotations.
Hibernate is an ORM, meaning (at its most basic level) it maps instances of java objects to actual rows in a database table. Generally, for pojo's retrieved via Hibernate: any manipulations and modifications to these pojo's will appear in the database. Hibernate will generate and execute the relevant SQL at an appropriate time.
Mybatis (at its most basic level) is simply a tool for piecing together and executing SQL that is stored in xml files. It does not map instances of Java objects to rows in a database table, rather it maps Java methods to SQL statements, and therefore it is not an ORM. It can also return pojo's of course, but they are not tied to any kind of a persistence context.
Both tools do a lot more than described above, but one is an ORM and one is not.
The criteria to enable you to choose which one to use, I believe, depends critically on the database model you have to work with.
For example imagine a large sprawling schema, representing some insurance model. Developers are required to retrieve
data, and interact with that data in a way that meets the business at hand.
Developer's come on go, and would never be expected to have the requisite business knowledge to write all
the sql by hand (which Mybatis would require). Hibernate would suit a scenario like that.
Business analysts define the datamodel, the entities, the relationships and the interactions, as is their expertise.
Java developer's then use Hibernate to "walk the model". The business developer's can become very productive
quickly without the need to write complicated error prone sql to run on a very complicated schema.
In my expierence, both Hibernate and Mybatis are used regularly on the same project.
Where Hibernate is being used for
General C.R.U.D functionality
'Walking' the 'domain object' relational model
Session management
and where Mybatis is being used for
ad hoc queries
kick off (and interact with) stored procedures
support very specific or intricate queries
support complicated search queries, where search criteria is dynamic, and paging of results
if you're already using Spring, I would start with Spring JDBC rather than plunging right into Hibernate or iBatis. If you write your persistence tier in terms of interfaces, you should have no problem switching implementations after you've gotten Hibernate or iBatis under your belt.
There's no reason why it has to be an "all or none" decision. Use what's best for your situation.
I have a thick client, java swing application with a schema of 25 tables and ~15 JInternalFrames (data entry forms for the tables). I need to make a design choice of straight JDBC or ORM (hibernate with spring framework in this case) for DBMS interaction. Build out of the application will occur in the future.
Would hibernate be overkill for a project of this size? An explanation of either yes or no answer would be much appreciated (or even a different approach if warranted).
TIA.
Good question with no single simple answer.
I used to be a big fan of Hibernate after using it in multiple projects over multiple years.
I used to believe that any project should default to hibernate.
Today I am not so sure.
Hibernate (and JPA) is great for some things, especially early in the development cycle.
It is much faster to get to something working with Hibernate than it is with JDBC.
You get a lot of features for free - caching, optimistic locking and so on.
On the other hand it has some hidden costs. Hibernate is deceivingly simple when you start. Follow some tutorial, put some annotations on your class - and you've got yourself persistence. But it's not simple and to be able to write good code in it requires good understanding of both it's internal workings and database design. If you are just starting you may not be aware of some issues that may bite you later on, so here is an incomplete list.
Performance
The runtime performance is good enough, I have yet to see a situation where hibernate was the reason for poor performance in production. The problem is the startup performance and how it affects your unit tests time and development performance. When hibernate loads it analyzes all entities and does a lot of pre-caching - it can take about 5-10-15 seconds for a not very big application. So your 1 second unit test is going to take 11 secods now. Not fun.
Database Independency
It is very cool as long as you don't need to do some fine tuning on the database.
In-memory Session
For every transaction Hibernate will store an object in memory for every database row it "touches". It's a nice optimization when you are doing some simple data entry. If you need to process lots of objects for some reason though, it can seriously affect performance, unless you explicitly and carefully clean up the in-memory session on your own.
Cascades
Cascades allow you to simplify working with object graphs. For example if you have a root object and some children and you save root object, you can configure hibernate to save children as well. The problem starts when your object graph grow complex. Unless you are extremely careful and have a good understanding of what goes on internally, it's easy to mess this up. And when you do it is very hard to debug those problems.
Lazy Loading
Lazy Loading means that every time you load an object, hibernate will not load all it's related objects but instead will provide place holders which will be resolved as soon as you try to access them. Great optimization right? It is, except you need to be aware of this behaviour otherwise you will get cryptic errors. Google "LazyInitializationException" for an example. And be careful with performance. Depending on the order of how you load your objects and your object graph you may hit "n+1 selects problem". Google it for more information.
Schema Upgrades
Hibernate allows easy schema changes by just refactoring java code and restarting. It's great when you start. But then you release version one. And unless you want to lose your customers you need to provide them schema upgrade scripts. Which means no more simple refactoring as all schema changes must be done in SQL.
Views and Stored Procedures
Hibernate requires exclusive write access to the data it works with. Which means you can't really use views, stored procedures and triggers as those can cause changes to data with hibernate not aware of them. You can have some external processes writing data to the database in a separate transactions. But if you do, your cache will have invalid data. Which is one more thing to care about.
Single Threaded Sessions
Hibernate sessions are single threaded. Any object loaded through a session can only be accessed (including reading) from the same thread. This is acceptable for server side applications but might complicate things unnecessary if you are doing GUI based application.
I guess my point is that there are no free meals.
Hibernate is a good tool, but it's a complex tool, and it requires time to understand it properly. If you or your team members don't have such knowledge it might be simpler and faster to go with pure JDBC (or Spring JDBC) for a single application. On the other hand if you are willing to invest time into learning it (including learning by doing and debugging) than in the future you will be able to understand the tradeoffs better.
Hibernate can be good but it and other JPA ORMs tend to dictate your database structure to a degree. For example, composite primary keys can be done in Hibernate/JPA but they're a little awkward. There are other examples.
If you're comfortable with SQL I would strongly suggest you take a look at Ibatis. It can do 90%+ of what Hibernate can but is far simpler in implementation.
I can't think of a single reason why I'd ever choose straight JDBC (or even Spring JDBC) over Ibatis. Hibernate is a more complex choice.
Take a look at the Spring and Ibatis Tutorial.
No doubt Hibernate has its complexity.
But what I really like about the Hibernate approach (some others too) is the conceptual model you can get in Java is better. Although I don't think of OO as a panacea, and I don't look for theoritical purity of the design, I found so many times that OO does in fact simplify my code. As you asked specifically for details, here are some examples :
the added complexity is not in the model and entities, but in your framework for manipulating all entities for example. For maintainers, the hard part is not a few framework classes but your model, so Hibernate allows you to keep the hard part (the model) at its cleanest.
if a field (like an id, or audit fields, etc) is used in all your entities, then you can create a superclass with it. Therefore :
you write less code, but more importantly ...
there are less concepts in your model (the unique concept is unique in the code)
for free, you can write code more generic, that provided with an entity (unknown, no type-switching or cast), allows you to access the id.
Hibernate has also many features to deal with other model caracteristics you might need (now or later, add them only as needed). Take it as an extensibility quality for your design.
You might replace inheritance (subclassing) by composition (several entities having a same member, that contains a few related fields that happen to be needed in several entities).
There can be inheritance between a few of your entities. It often happens that you have two tables that have pretty much the same structure (but you don't want to store all data in one table, because you would loose referential integrity to a different parent table).
With reuse between your entities (but only appropriate inheritance, and composition), there is usually some additional advantages to come. Examples :
there is often some way to read the data of the entities that is similar but different. Suppose I read the "title" field for three entities, but for some I replace the result with a differing default value if it is null. It is easy to have a signature "getActualTitle" (in a superclass or an interface), and implement the default value handling in the three implementations. That means the code out of my entities just deals with the concept of an "actual title" (I made this functional concept explicit), and the method inheritance takes care of executing the correct code (no more switch or if, no code duplication).
...
Over time, the requirements evolve. There will be a point where your database structure has problems. With JDBC alone, any change to the database must impact the code (ie. double cost). With Hibernate, many changes can be absorbed by changing only the mapping, not the code. The same happens the other way around : Hibernate lets you change your code (between versions for example) without altering your database (changing the mapping, although it is not always sufficient). To summarize, Hibernate lets your evolve your database and your code independtly.
For all these reasons, I would choose Hibernate :-)
I think either is a fine choice, but personally I would use hibernate. I don't think hibernate is overkill for a project of that size.
Where Hibernate really shines for me is dealing with relationships between entities/tables. Doing JDBC by hand can take a lot of code if you deal with modifying parent and children (grandchildren, siblings, etc) at the same time. Hibernate can make this a breeze (often a single save of the parent entity is enough).
There are certainly complexities when dealing with Hibernate though, such as understanding how the Session flushing works, and dealing with lazy loading.
Straight JDBC would fit the simplest cases at best.
If you want to stay within Java and OOD then going Hibernate or Hibernate/JPA or any-other-JPA-provider/JPA should be your choice.
If you are more comfortable with SQL then having Spring for JDBC templates and other SQL-oriented frameworks won't hurt.
In contrast, besides transactional control, there is not much help from having Spring when working with JPA.
Hibernate best suits for the middleware applications. Assume that we build a middle ware on top of the data base, The middelware is accessed by around 20 applications in that case we can have a hibernate which satisfies the requirement of all 20 applications.
In JDBC, if we open a database connection we need to write in try, and if any exceptions occurred catch block will takers about it, and finally used to close the connections.
In jdbc all exceptions are checked exceptions, so we must write code in try, catch and throws, but in hibernate we only have Un-checked exceptions
Here as a programmer we must close the connection, or we may get a chance to get our of connections message…!
Actually if we didn’t close the connection in the finally block, then jdbc doesn’t responsible to close that connection.
In JDBC we need to write Sql commands in various places, after the program has created if the table structure is modified then the JDBC program doesn’t work, again we need to modify and compile and re-deploy required, which is tedious.
JDBC used to generate database related error codes if an exception will occurs, but java programmers are unknown about this error codes right.
While we are inserting any record, if we don’t have any particular table in the database, JDBC will rises an error like “View not exist”, and throws exception, but in case of hibernate, if it not found any table in the database this will create the table for us
JDBC support LAZY loading and Hibernate supports Eager loading
Hibernate supports Inheritance, Associations, Collections
In hibernate if we save the derived class object, then its base class object will also be stored into the database, it means hibernate supporting inheritance
Hibernate supports relationships like One-To-Many,One-To-One, Many-To- Many-to-Many, Many-To-One
Hibernate supports caching mechanism by this, the number of round trips between an application and the database will be reduced, by using this caching technique an application performance will be increased automatically
Getting pagination in hibernate is quite simple.
Hibernate has capability to generate primary keys automatically while we are storing the records into database
... In-memory Session ... LazyInitializationException ...
You could look at Ebean ORM which doesn't use session objects ... and where lazy loading just works. Certainly an option, not overkill, and will be simpler to understand.
if billions of user using out app or web then in jdbc query will get executed billions of time but in hibernate query will get executed only once for any number of user most important and easy advantage of hibernate over jdbc.