Hibernate is an object relational mapping or ORM tool, developed in 2001 by Kevin King along with his colleagues from Cirrus Technologies. Today, even after almost two decades, it's still the first choice by many developers for connecting Java applications with our DBMS. Java provides JDBC as an API for connecting your Java applications with any RDBMS in a vendor independent fashion. As long as you have a JDBC URL, username and password to the database, and a driver class name, typically provided by the DB vendor. The JDBC code you write need not be written specific to an RDBMS. Generally, we work with entity objects like products, customers, employees, etc.

But to get the data stored in an RDBMS table as rows in javas object format, we have to write lots of boilerplate, redundant code. Also, there are lots of impedance mismatch between the concepts of our DBMS concepts of Opie. For example, tables in an RDBMS have primary key foreign key relationships, while objects have aggregation, inheritance polymorphism, etc. hibernate as an ORM implementation provides solution to almost all such impedance mismatches. hibernate also provides additional features like caching, lazy loading, dirty reads to improve the performance. hibernate main API is an interface called session which provides the CRUD operations in the form of functions like persist, get merge or delete.

For retrieving entity objects based on various criteria. There is another interface called query. We will be covering all these major aspects in this course, so that you may quickly get started with any hibernate warum project. So let's get started with software setup.