Hibernate is a popular ORM framework that handles object-relational impedance mismatch. It allows working with objects in Java code without being constrained by the relational database model. Hibernate maps Java objects to database tables and handles all interactions with the database, such as queries, inserts, updates and deletes. The Hibernate architecture includes a persistence context that caches managed objects between transactions and handles object states. Hibernate supports various relationships between entities like one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many.