What is Hibernate ?

Hibernate is an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) solution for JAVA. It is a powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service. It allows us to develop persistent classes following object-oriented principles including association, inheritance and polymorphism.

Hibernate is a solution or object relational mapping and a persistence management
solution. Hibernate provides a solution to map database tables to a classI It copies the database data to a class. In the other direction it supports to save objects to the databaseI In this process the object is trans ormed to one or more tables. Saving data to a storage is called persistence and the copying of tables to objects and vice versa is called object relational mapping.

Hibernate itself opens connection to database, converts HQL (Hibernate Query Language) statements to database specific statement, receives result set, then performs mapping of these database specific data to Java objects which are directly used by Java application.

Hibernate uses the database specification from Hibernate Properties file. Automatic mapping is performed on the basis of the properties defined in hbm XML file defined for particular Java object.