1) Introduction
Persistent data can be seen anywhere in an application. Managing persistent data is one of the
few challenges that modern technologies/products are facing. A solution called Object-Relational
Mapping (ORM) has gained major popularity over the past few years. ORM is a piece of
software/product for the representation and conversion of data between the database and the
object-oriented programming language. Hibernate is one such ORM solution and it is an open-source
project.
Though Hibernate is not the only persistence solution, it has become very famous over the recent
past because of its huge variety of features when compared with its competitors. It takes much of
the database related boiler-plate code from the developers, thereby asking the developers to
concentrate on the core business logic of the application and not with the error-prone SQL syntax.
2) Persistence
The definition of persistence can be given like this, "Data that can be stored to some permanent
medium and can be seen at any point of time even after the application that created the data has
ended". Persisting (or preserving) data is not an easy task and it is one of the basic necessities
for almost any application. The common storage mediums that we see in our day-to-day life are
hard-disk and a database.
Databases are the most preferred storage medium for persisting data because of the relatively simple
way for data-access using the Structured Query Language (SQL). Data within a database can be viewed
in a table format, where each row in the table represents a single record of data.
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