What is the difference between Hibernate and Spring Data JPA

What are the main differences between Hibernate and Spring Data JPA? When should we not use Hibernate or Spring Data JPA? Also, when may Spring JDBC template perform better than Hibernate / Spring Data JPA?

Solution 1:

Hibernate is a JPA implementation, while Spring Data JPA is a JPA data access abstraction. Spring Data JPA cannot work without a JPA provider.

Spring Data offers a solution to the DDD Repository pattern or the legacy GenericDao custom implementations. It can also generate JPA queries on your behalf through method name conventions.

With Spring Data, you may use Hibernate, EclipseLink, or any other JPA provider. A very interesting benefit of using Spring or Java EE is that you can control transaction boundaries declaratively using the @Transactional annotation.

Spring JDBC is much more lightweight, and it's intended for native querying, and if you only intend to use JDBC alone, then you are better off using Spring JDBC to deal with the JDBC verbosity.

Therefore, Hibernate and Spring Data are complementary rather than competitors.

Solution 2:

There are 3 different things we are using here :

1. JPA : Java persistence api which provide specification for persisting, reading, managing data from your java object to relations in database.
2. Hibernate: There are various provider which implement jpa. Hibernate is one of them. So we have other provider as well. But if using jpa with spring it allows you to switch to different providers in future.
3. Spring Data JPA : This is another layer on top of jpa which spring provide to make your life easy.

So lets understand how spring data jpa and spring + hibernate works-

Spring Data JPA:

Let's say you are using spring + hibernate for your application. Now you need to have dao interface and implementation where you will be writing crud operation using SessionFactory of hibernate. Let say you are writing dao class for Employee class, tomorrow in your application you might need to write similiar crud operation for any other entity. So there is lot of boilerplate code we can see here.

Now Spring data jpa allow us to define dao interfaces by extending its repositories(crudrepository, jparepository) so it provide you dao implementation at runtime. You don't need to write dao implementation anymore.Thats how spring data jpa makes your life easy.