Hibernate advantages and disadvantages Posted on: October 27, 2010 at 12:00 AM
Learn the Hibernate advantages and disadvantages and decided when to user Hibernate.
Hibernate advantages and disadvantages
In this section we will discuss Hibernate advantages and disadvantages, and
see why we should or shouldn't use Hibernate. Hibernate is an ORM tool that
automatically maps your domain object to the relational database. It helps to
developers to quickly write database access program and become productive. But
we will see the advantages and disadvantages of Hibernate ORM tool.
Java developers of all over the world is mostly using Hibernate or JPA (with
Hibernate) for developing enterprise web applications. There are lots of
material and tutorials on Hibernate on the web. As a developer if you are stuck
some where in your programming, you can easily find the solution of your problem
on the web. You can even download and learn Hibernate easily from our Hibernate Tutorial
Here is the video tutorial of: "What are the advantages and disadvantages of Hibernate?"
Let's discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Hibernate
Advantages of Hibernate
Hibernate is better then plain JDBC: You
can use Hibernate which generates the SQL on the fly and then
automatically executes the necessary SQL statements. This saves
a lot of development and debugging time of the developer.
Writing JDBC statement, setting the parameters, executing query
and processing the result by hand is lot of work. Hibernate will
save all tedious efforts.
Mapping of Domain object to relational database:
Hibernate maps your domain object with the relational database.
Now you can concentrate on your business logic rather than
managing the data in database.
Layered architecture: Hibernate is layers
architecture and you can use the components as per your
JPA Provider: Hibernate can work as JPA
provider in JPA based applications.
Standard ORM: Hibernate is standard ORM
solutions and it also supports JPA.
Database Independent: Hibernate is database
independent and you can use any database of your choice.
Caching Framework: There are many caching framework
that works with Hibernate. You can use any one in your
application to improve the performance of your application.
Disadvantages of Hibernate
Lots of API to learn: A lot of effort is
required to learn Hibernate. So, not very easy to learn
Debugging: Sometimes debugging and
performance tuning becomes difficult.
Slower than JDBC: Hibernate is slower than
pure JDBC as it is generating lots of SQL statements in runtime.
Not suitable for Batch processing: It
advisable to use pure JDBC for batch processing.