In Relation To

We are happy to announce that, starting with the upcoming releases of Hibernate ORM 7.4, the core modules of Hibernate Tools will be integrated directly into the Hibernate ORM repository.

In this post we will cover the motivation behind the move, what it means for your build files, what happens to the Eclipse tooling, and how to get started with the new coordinates.

Hibernate ORM 7.3 Final was released a few weeks ago and today 7.3.1 will be released.

Details about the release, as well as links to important resources, can be found at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/releases/tag/7.3.0.

Some of the new features include -

Another release candidate version for Hibernate ORM 7.3 has just been released: 7.3.0.CR2.

Details about the release, as well as links to important resources, can be found at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/releases/tag/7.3.0.CR2

A first Alpha of ORM 8.0 has just been released implementing support for JPA 4.0 (as of its first milestone). The vast majority of things are implemented, but a few still remain (default fetch type for to-one associations and @ExcludedFromVersioning, e.g.).

Details about the release can be found at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/releases/tag/8.0.0.Alpha1.

Details about JPA 4.0 can be found at https://in.relation.to/2026/01/20/JPA-4-M1/.

A first CR for Hibernate ORM 7.3 has just been released.

Details about the release, as well as links to important resources, can be found at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/releases/tag/7.3.0.CR1

I recently appeared on the Tech Lead Journal podcast, and the host, Henry Suryawirawan, picked up on a comment I made about the cost of a mistake I made many years ago, namely, the mistake of underestimating the importance of Hibernate’s StatelessSession, and of not including it in the Java Persistence API.

You might think my statement a bit hyperbolic, and I guess it was intended in that vein, but let me give you a quick order-of-magnitude computation suggesting that my estimate was not far off.

The cost of this mistake should rightly include:

Hibernate ORM 7.1 Final has just been released.

Details about the release, as well as links to important resources, can be found at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/releases/tag/7.1.0

Today—​or rather, late last night—​we released Hibernate ORM 7, which includes the latest version of Hibernate Data Repositories. We’ve also released Hibernate Validator 9.

This is the first production-ready version of our platform available entirely under the Apache Software License. (Yes, that includes Envers!) And it’s the first version of our platform to fully support Jakarta EE 11.

Compared to the massive reengineering effort that went into Hibernate 6, this release is much more incremental, and most users should experience a smoother migration. But, as befits a major release, we’ve removed some deprecated functionality. So let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

Hibernate ORM 7.0 Final has just been released.

Details about the release, as well as links to important resources, can be found at https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/releases/tag/7.0.0