What is Hibernate?

Hibernate is a pure Java object-relational mapping (ORM) and persistence framework that allows you to map plain old Java objects to relational database tables using (XML) configuration files. Hibernate not only takes care of the mapping from Java classes to database tables (and from Java data types to SQL data types), but also provides data query and retrieval facilities that can significantly reduce development time otherwise spent with manual data handling in SQL and JDBC.
There are several benefits of using Hibernate

• Powerful object-oriented hibernate query language
• Descriptive O/R Mapping through mapping file.
•  Hibernate cache : Session Level, Query and Second level cache.
• Transparent persistence based on POJOs without byte code processing
• Automatic primary key generation
• Performance: Lazy initialization, Outer join fetching, Batch fetching