Portal Development and Text Searching with Hibernate

What is Hibernate?

Hibernate is the most popular persistence model for Relational Databases (RDBMS) which is widely adopted and is an open source framework with rapid release cycles. Mapping database tables to objects in a program, makes Hibernate an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) Framework.

Who can learn Hibernate?

Anyone with knowledge of Relational Databases and Java can learn Hibernate. Previously developers used to write native SQL queries to perform operations in database but the biggest problem with this approach is your application code and database access code gets tightly coupled. Now lets suppose if we want to change the back end of the application, for e. g. Oracle to MySQL or vice versa, it will require us to refactor all the database access code according to the new database. Hibernate solves this problem using Hibernate Query Language (HQL) which generates database specific queries, hence we don’t need to change the database queries manually. Apart from that, the Hibernate offers different level of caches to improve the performance of your queries. The other big advantage of using Hibernate is that your database table mappings become visible in application code through annotations.

With latest release Hibernate supports NoSQL databases and comes with supporting APIs like Hibernate Search which gives you the ability to perform full-text search.