Hibernate Vs JDBC

Hibernate is better than JDBC because of the following reasons

Support for Query Language:
JDBC supports only native Structured Query Language (SQL). Developer has to find out the
efficient way to access database, i.e to select effective query from a number of queries to perform same task. Hibernate provides a powerful query language Hibernate Query Language
(independent from type of database) that is expressed in a familiar SQL like syntax and includes full support for polymorphic queries. Hibernate also supports native SQL statements. It also selects an effective way to perform a database manipulation task for an application.

Database Dependent Code:
Application using JDBC to handle persistent data (database tables) having database specific code in large amount. The code written to map table data to application objects and vice versa is actually to map table fields to object properties. As table changed or database changed then it’s essential to change object structure as well as to change code written to map table-to-object/object-to-table. Hibernate provides this mapping itself. The actual mapping between tables and application objects is done in XML files. If there is change in Database or in any table then the only need to change XML file properties.

Maintenance Cost :
With JDBC, it is developer’s responsibility to handle JDBC result set and convert it to Java objects through code to use this persistent data in application. So with JDBC, mapping between Java objects and database tables is done manually. Hibernate reduces lines of code by maintaining object-table mapping itself and returns result to application in form of Java objects. It relieves programmer from manual handling of persistent data, hence reducing the development time and maintenance cost.

Optimize Performance:
Caching is retention of data, usually in application to reduce disk access. Hibernate, with
Transparent Persistence, cache is set to application work space. Relational tuples are moved to this cache as a result of query. It improves performance if client application reads same data many times for same write. Automatic Transparent Persistence allows the developer to concentrate more on business logic rather than this application code. With JDBC, caching is maintained by hand-coding.

Relational Persistence for JAVA:
Working with both Object-Oriented software and Relational Database is complicated task with
JDBC because there is mismatch between how data is represented in objects versus relational
database. So with JDBC, developer has to write code to map an object model's data representation to a relational data model and its corresponding database schema. Hibernate is flexible and powerful ORM solution to map Java classes to database tables. Hibernate itself takes care of this mapping using XML files so developer does not need to write code for this.

Transparent Persistence:
The automatic mapping of Java objects with database tables and vice versa is called Transparent Persistence. Hibernate provides transparent persistence and developer does not need to write code explicitly to map database tables tuples to application objects during interaction with RDBMS. With JDBC this conversion is to be taken care of by the developer manually with lines of code.

Automatic Versioning and Time Stamping:
By database versioning one can be assured that the changes done by one person is not being roll backed by another one unintentionally. Hibernate enables developer to define version type field to application, due to this defined field Hibernate updates version field of database table every time relational tuple is updated in form of Java class object to that table. So if two users retrieve same tuple and then modify it and one user save this modified tuple to database, version is automatically updated for this tuple by Hibernate. When other user tries to save updated tuple to database then it does not allow to save it because this user does not has updated data. In JDBC there is no check that always every user has updated data. This check has to be added by the developer.

Open-Source, Zero-Cost Product License:
Hibernate is an open source and free to use for both development and production deployments.

Enterprise-Class Reliability and Scalability:
Hibernate scales well in any environment, no matter if use it in-house Intranet that serves hundreds of users or for mission-critical applications that serve hundreds of thousands. JDBC can not be scaled easily.