In Relation To

Hi, Vlad. First of all, I’d like to thank you for having me. My name is Arnold Gálovics (@ArnoldGalovics on Twitter). I’m 25 years old and currently living in the capital of Hungary, Budapest.

Since I got my first computer, I’ve always been curious how software works, so I got into the software development industry to see what’s happening under the hood.

In the last 5 years, I worked in the telecommunication industry where I was responsible for developing an application for strictly internal usage which was purely just getting and manipulating the data we needed and at the end wiring it together.

After that, I got into the financial industry and now I’m working on a very interesting project where we are creating a huge platform with all the new fancy tools/technologies.

In the last few years, I was mostly focusing on the standard Java stack, Oracle, JPA/Hibernate, Spring, Eclipse RCP, Angular. First, when I got into the JPA world, it was like real magic for me what was happening and how clever the people are who wrote such a tool. A couple of months ago I wanted to try myself out in the open-source community, and I chose Hibernate ORM to contribute into as it was familiar to me and, of course, I wanted to give something back.

In the meantime, I also started a technical blog where I love to publish articles. Despite the fact, I don’t have the time I’d like to invest into blogging because I’m currently working as a Senior Software Engineer in a full-time job, but I’m trying to work on it as much as I can.

Absolutely. Especially for smaller projects but of course it’s reliable for bigger ones as well you just have to understand the consequences of the choices you make. In good hands, for a relational database, Hibernate is a really great choice.

There are tons of great features which are helping you throughout the evolution of the application, and I strongly feel that especially lately the Hibernate team did an amazing job for making the ORM framework better and better.

As I mentioned, there are lots of great features offered by Hibernate, but people often think that Hibernate is a silver bullet and they usually don’t understand the concept or how a certain feature should be used.

The main problem is that people tend to forget that under JPA/Hibernate, there are SQL statements executed against the underlying database and they don’t care about this, thus struggling with the performance of the application.

There are simple things which you should look out for, like the merge pitfall of declarative transaction management, entity state transitions, fetching only the data you need, etc.

I’ve seen many projects which are using anti-patterns in the data-access layer like putting every association to EAGER fetching, having a general data-access layer, wrong transaction boundaries.

Usually, after a couple of performance issues, projects want to drop JPA/Hibernate just to go with pure SQL to have better performance, however, understanding the problem and verifying the executed SQL statements is the way to go in my opinion instead of dropping the ORM completely.

My main message here is: you can use JPA/Hibernate for your project, just understand how it works and how to use it efficiently. There are books, blogs, the user guide improved a lot.

I personally recommend reading Vlad’s High-Performance Java Persistence book and his blog because you can learn a lot from it.

I also suggest visiting my blog as I usually write about Hibernate and performance related problems.

I’ve seen many issues popping up during the last few years, and most of them occurred due to not thinking about the performance in advance. I think JDBC batching is the perfect example for this as there are lots of things you have to be careful about, like JDBC driver, underlying DB, not flushing in the middle of a transaction, reordering, etc.

In my opinion, it’s essential to consider performance from the beginning because there are so many things which might go wrong in the data-access layer.

I’m really thankful for the Hibernate team because you guys are making a great tool for the community. I think Hibernate is currently in a state where most of the features are in place, and only minor adjustments are necessary so I wouldn’t add anything special here.

Thank you, Arnold, for taking your time. It is a great honor to have you here. To reach Arnold, you can follow him on Twitter.