What is Object/relational mapping(ORM) in relation to Hibernate and JDBC?

Question

Can someone explain, in layman terms, what is Object/relational mapping(ORM) in relation to Hibernate and JDBC?

Diagrams would be especially helpful for understandi

Answer 1

I was reading on Hibernate and stumbled across this thread. Doing further research, I found this other great explanation which may help someone:

Hibernate framework simplifies the development of java application to interact with the database. Hibernate is an open source, lightweight, ORM (Object Relational Mapping) tool.

An ORM tool simplifies the data creation, data manipulation and data access. It is a programming technique that maps the object to the data stored in the database.

Advantages of Hibernate:

1) Opensource and Lightweight: Hibernate framework is opensource under the LGPL license and lightweight.

2) Fast performance: The performance of hibernate framework is fast because cache is internally used in hibernate framework. There are two types of cache in hibernate framework first level cache and second level cache. First level cache is enabled bydefault.

3) Database Independent query: HQL (Hibernate Query Language) is the object-oriented version of SQL. It generates the database independent queries. So you don't need to write database specific queries. Before Hibernate, If database is changed for the project, we need to change the SQL query as well that leads to the maintenance problem.

4) Automatic table creation: Hibernate framework provides the facility to create the tables of the database automatically. So there is no need to create tables in the database manually.

5) Simplifies complex join: To fetch data form multiple tables is easy in hibernate framework.

6) Provides query statistics and database status: Hibernate supports Query cache and provide statistics about query and database status.

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