Hibernate Feature List

Performance

Lazy initialization

for collections
for entity objects (uses runtime bytecode enhancement - no need to implement interfaces)

Outer join fetching

to initialize a graph of associated objects in a single select (for databases with ANSI-style or Oracle-style outerjoins)

Batch fetching

Association roles may be fetched predictively, by batch

Subselect fetching

Collections may be fetched efficiently using a subselect

Support for optimistic locking with versioning/timestamping

Allows a single conversation (Session) to extend across multiple database connections / transactions without sacrificing transaction isolation. Version numbers / timestamps are updated automatically by Hibernate.

Highly scalable architecture

Designed from the ground up to work in a cluster. Unless the second-level cache is used, there is essentially NO synchronization used in the entire persistence layer. Transaction isolation is guaranteed by the way Hibernate integrates with database / JTA transactions.

High performance

Minimal overhead compared to direct JDBC.

SQL generated at system initialization time

rather than at runtime (or buildtime)

Transactional write-behind, and transparent JDBC batching

Since Hibernate executes SQL asynchrously, it is able to transparently make use of the JDBC batch update API for insert, update and delete

Optional "tuned" `INSERT` and `UPDATE`

INSERT and UPDATE SQL may be generated dynamically, including only those columns that are needed

Property level lazy fetching via build-time bytecode instrumentation

(Buildtime bytecode instrumentation is fully optional, and almost never necessary)

Support for update by `ROWID` on Oracle

Built-in support for various powerful open source JDBC connection pools and cache implementations

Including C3P0, Proxool, JBossCache, EHCache, OSCache, SwarmCache

[Hibernate 3.1] Stateless session API for bulk/batch processing

Allows streaming inserts or updates of large datasets