CHAPTER 5
An Overview of Mapping
The purpose of Hibernate is to allow you to treat your database as if it stores Java objects. However, in practice, relational databases do not store objects—they store data in tables and columns. Unfortunately, there is no simple way to correlate the data stored in a relational database with the data represented by Java objects.1
The difference between an object-oriented association and a relational one is fundamental. Consider a simple class to represent a user, and another to represent an email address, as shown in Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1. An object-oriented association
User objects contain fields referring ...
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