Hibernate 6: A Major Redesign of the Popular ORM Solution
Hibernate 6 is a major redesign of the world’s most popular and feature-rich ORM solution. The article shows that the redesign has touched almost every subsystem of Hibernate, including the APIs, mapping annotations, and the query language. This new Hibernate is more powerful, more robust, and more typesafe. It takes advantage of the advances in relational databases over the past decade, updating the query language to support new constructs in modern dialects of SQL. It also exhibits much more consistent behavior across different databases, greatly improving portability, and generates higher-quality DDL from dialect-independent code. The article highlights that Hibernate 6 improves error reporting, enhances the type-safety of O/R mapping annotations, clarifies the separation of API, SPI, and internal implementation, and removes or deprecates legacy APIs. It is now a core component of Quarkus 3, the most exciting new environment for cloud-native development in Java. The article concludes that Hibernate 6 is the new canonical guide to Hibernate, providing a great deal of detail about many aspects of Hibernate.