HIBERNATE
Object-Relational Mapping
• It is a programming technique for converting
object-type data of an object oriented
programming language into database tables.
• Hibernate is used convert object data in JAVA
to relational database tables.
What is Hibernate?
• It is open source object-relational mapping
(ORM) for Java.
• Hibernate is responsible for making data
persistent by storing it in a database.
Why Hibernate and not JDBC?
• JDBC maps Java classes to database tables (and from Java
data types to SQL data types)
• Hibernate automatically generates the SQL queries.
• Hibernate provides data query and retrieval facilities and can
significantly reduce development time as more time is
required to manually handle data in SQL and JDBC.
• It makes an application portable to all SQL databases.
Architecture
Hibernate sits between your
code and the database
Maps persistent objects to
tables in the database
Hibernate
• Configuration Object:
– The Configuration object is the first Hibernate object you create in any Hibernate
application and usually created only once during application initialization. The
Configuration object provides two keys components:
– Database Connection: This is handled through one or more configuration files
supported by Hibernate. These files are hibernate.properties and hibernate.cfg.xml.
– Class Mapping Setup
This component creates the connection between the Java classes and database tables.
• SessionFactory Object:
– Configuration object is used to create a SessionFactory object which inturn configures
Hibernate for the application using the supplied configuration file and allows for a
Session object to be instantiated.
– SessionFactory is a thread safe object and used by all the threads of an application.
– The SessionFactory is heavyweight object so usually it is created during application start
up and kept for later use.
– You would need one SessionFactory object per database using a separate configuration
file. So if you are using multiple databases then you would have to create multiple
SessionFactory objects.
Hibernate
• Session Object:
– A Session is used to get a physical connection with a database.
– It is lightweight and designed to be instantiated each time an interaction is needed
with the database. Persistent objects are saved and retrieved through a Session
object.
– The session objects should not be kept open for a long time because they are not
usually thread safe and they should be created and destroyed as needed.
• Transaction Object:
– A Transaction represents a unit of work with the database and most of the RDBMS
supports transaction functionality. Transactions in Hibernate are handled by an
underlying transaction manager and transaction (from JDBC or JTA).
– This is an optional object and Hibernate applications may choose not to use this
interface, instead managing transactions in their own application code.
• Query Object:
– Query objects use SQL or Hibernate Query Language (HQL) string to retrieve data
from the database and create objects. A Query instance is used to bind query
parameters and to execute the query.
