Andy Grove's Blog

Those of you who know me will be well aware of my bias towards the DAO approach to writing Java persistence code but I'm currently spending time getting to grips with Hibernate. As a freelance developer, Hibernate is now an essential skill to list on my resume due to it's widespread use. It's easy to see why Hibernate is so popular - it allows database driven applications to be developed using natural idiomatic Java code and doesn't require volumes of tedious code to be written to a low level API like JDBC.

My only real concern with Hibernate is the overhead it adds to an application compared to using JDBC directly but I don't have any empirical evidence to back this up. Also, Hibernate could potentially have better performance than JDBC because, as a runtime framework, there are opportunities for caching data. Ultimately, as with most technology comparisons, I expect that both Hibernate and plain JDBC code have particular use cases that they are best suited to.

I'm currently putting together a test application to try and understand the performance characteristics of Hibernate compared to low level JDBC code. I'm also using this as a means to learn Hibernate.

I'll post the results here as I get them.

Labels: java, persistence