Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition

Chapter 1. Understanding object/relational persistence

In this chapter

• Persistence with SQL databases in Java applications

• The object/relational paradigm mismatch

• Introducing ORM, JPA, and Hibernate

This book is about Hibernate; our focus is on using Hibernate as a provider of the Java Persistence API. We cover basic and advanced features and describe some ways to develop new applications using Java Persistence. Often, these recommendations aren’t specific to Hibernate. Sometimes they’re our own ideas about the best ways to do things when working with persistent data, explained in the context of Hibernate.

The approach to managing persistent data has been a key design decision in every software project we’ve worked on. Given that persistent ...