Most Java devs would have heard of hibernate. It’s a nice tool. Haven played and used Hibernate in production I was very impressed with it. Folks like me would have read several blogs of how Arugo enterprises  was able to use Hibernate and terracotta/Caching to scale applications. With the impressive performance seen all over the blogosphere, there is certainly no need to have a rethink about using Hibernate, just jump into the boat of experts.  This might have been what Java experts have been using to cure the impression that Java is slow.

Truth is, while hibernate helps well with ORM, I really doubt if it’s what most of us need. Especially when performance matters. But, u might ask, have u tried Hibernate with the latest ehcache, or sorry JBossCache3.1 appears even more impressive. This should give more compelling reasons to consider Hibernate. From my experience a well designed and optimized DB is orders of magnitude better than Hibernate with whatever combination u choose to bring into the mix. But another would say, but native SQL is possible with Hibernate. Yeah, but it doesn’t still give u the performance of pure jdbc. Some of the Util jdbc support classes in Springframework are good enough to develop a very decent app, with better performance. While Hibernate makes us smell update to date, it might not be what a medium sized app most of us build need. Using JDBC can also help to diverse your skillset to so extent. I mean learning SQL and the workings of your DB. Hibernate shields some of these stuffs from us.

So the buzz about Hibernate terracotta/Caching is all gibberish. Nah! The Scale of most of those apps really warrants and explains the massive performance gain. There are certainly limits to optimization of any DBs engine. But have we even explored the numerous options available? For some, performance within the context of speed might not be all you want in an application. State management, Object Mapping, Object caching, leveraging existing code quality  etc might be good excuses to use hibernate.

Have u been using Hibernate, is the performance overhead noticeable enough to warrant dumping it? Share your  experiences.