In Relation To

For several months, Versant, an old-school OODBMS vendor with a collapsing market cap, has been making any number of false claims about Hibernate in online webinars and sales presentations. I went so far as to write a blog refuting their claims, but then held back on publishing it because I thought they didn't deserve the attention. They've now resorted to mass emailings of a document with many false claims about Hibernate, and we've decided we need to respond for the record.

We got dissed by a Spring developer!

Hibernate 3.0 is the world's most sophisticated ORXM (Object/Relational/XML Mapping) solution. Hibernate3 makes it easier than ever before for Java applications to interact with persistent data, allowing a single definition of the transformation between various in-memory representations of the entity data and the relational schema, even in the case of very complex legacy schemas and schemas for historical data or data with visibility rules. Hibernate3 also provides the most comprehensive object/relational query functionality, with three full-featured query facilities: Hibernate Query Language, the newly enhanced Hibernate Criteria Query API, and enhanced support for queries expressed in the native SQL dialect of the database.

Cedric beat me to this, but if you missed his announcement, the EJB 3.0 second early draft is available. The most interesting new stuff to me is:

We just released Hibernate 3.0 beta 1. I've no time to list all the many changes since the alpha was released four months ago, let alone everything that is new in Hibernate3, which has been in development for over a year now.

Type - not sex, or race - discrimination is what we do when we read a row from a SQL query result set, and determine what Java class we should instantiate to hold the data from that row. Type discrimination is needed by any ORM solution or handwritten persistence layer that supports polymorphic queries or associations.

September 20-22 in Melbourne will be the first time we deliver our new three-day Hibernate course. The course has been heavily revised and expanded to include previews of the cool new stuff coming in Hibernate3 and an overview of Hibernate internals (/very/ useful if you ever need to debug a Hibernate application). There are still seats available, if you're quick! This will be the last training we run in Australia for a while, since I won't be in the country much, if at all, over the next six months or so. Email training@jboss.com for more information. (We also have an upcoming course in Paris, November 3-5.)

I gotta preface this post by saying that we are very skeptical of the idea that Java is the right place to do processing that works with data in bulk. By extension, ORM is probably not an especially appropriate way to do batch processing. We think that most databases offer excellent solutions in this area: stored procedure support, and various tools for import and export. Because of this, we've neglected to properly explain to people how to use Hibernate for batch processing if they really feel they /have/ to do it in Java. At some point, we have to swallow our pride, and accept that lots of people are actually doing this, and make sure they are doing it the Right Way.

One of the joys of working on an open source project with commercial competitors is having to implement features that our users simply don't ask for, and probably won't use in practice, just because those competitors try to spin their useless features as a competitive advantage. We realized ages ago that it's really hard to tell people that they don't need and shouldn't use a feature if you don't have it.

We were doing some work with a customer with a very large project recently, and they were concerned about traceability of the SQL issued by Hibernate. Their problem is one that I guess is common: suppose I see something wong in the Hibernate log (say, some N+1 selects problem), how do I know which of my business classes is producing this? All I've got in the Hibernate log is org.hibernate.SQL, line 224 as the source of the log message!