What is Hibernate ?

• Its actual meaning is “To be active and Spending a long time in a asleep State”. Frogs and Lizards and many more does this in their life of Winter.  
• Our Hibernate Framework also works the same way. It remains active behind the application.
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• Hibernate is the open source light weight Framework invented by Gavin King.
• Hibernate is ORM based Framework , it transfer the data between an application and a database (Relational) in the form of the objects.
• It is Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework.

• Hibernate is a non-invasive framework, means it will not force the programmer to extend/implement any class/interface, and in hibernate we have to use POJO classes so it is light weight framework.

• Hibernate can be use for a standalone desktop application and also for web based application, In short it is suitable for all types of applications (stand alone or desktop or any web application)
 

• Hibernate is use to insert/update/Select/delete data from Database.

It builds persistent objects using following Java feature:
Inheritance
Association
Composition
Polymorphism
Collections API for Mappings
Easy query feature
Hibernate Query Language (HQL)
Criteria Query
Query by Example