Preface

Object-Relational Mapping is a difficult problem, and the Hibernate team has solved that problem for us. Some developers have a love-hate relationship with Hibernate because it has made life easier for many developers, but at times, unexpected behavior is encountered and it quickly becomes a mystery. This book was written to uncover these mysteries. It does so by looking under the hood; it first discusses the internals of Hibernate, and later it covers advanced topics on mapping techniques, annotations, fetching, caching, and versioning. It also addresses other topics that are of interest to technical leads and software architects, such as statistics and metrics, concurrency, and transaction management.

Although, it is recommended that you read this book in its entirety, the topics are carefully outlined so that it can also be used as a reference if you wish to learn about a specific feature.