Hibernate is a high-performance Object/Relational persistence and query service which is licensed under the open source GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and is free to download.

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.

Audience:

This tutorial is designed for Java programmers with a need to understand the Hibernate framework and API. This tutorial will bring you at intermediate level of expertise.

Prerequisites:

Before proceeding with this tutorial you should have a good understanding of the Java programming language. A basic understanding of relational databases, JDBC and SQL is very helpful.