Hibernate

What do you like best?

In addition to its own API Hibernate provide fully implementation of JPA specifications and standard.

Different strategy for identity

Fetching eagerly strategy on a single query

Default first level Caching and then optional 2nd level cache

Database schema independent HQL

Criteria query to make user friendly approach it is useful and easy to alter your criteria in future

Filter is also a main benefit when you are using hibernate

What do you dislike?

Low performance for complex query

Low performance for batch processing

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Hibernate generates dynamics queries so If your database schema has complex relations then think twice before using HQL. Although Hibernate provide simple interaction to populate data from a table to your java class.

If you have many tables and entities in the database, the ORM engine may create very complex queries that will slow down the database and application. If you are using the Hibernate ORM, I recommend that you simplify the table structure.

It could be more complex and in some cases it's impossible to fetch related data in 1 query at this stage I prefer to use native query or store procedure to mitigate the performance issue.

1 very important point Hibernate need expertise to implement it properly otherwise you never touch the good performance with it.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Independent from database schema

Low risk of data lost

Object Oriented Interface base mapping on java classes