Hibernate 6 New Features - What's new in the Hibernate 6 ORM?
Hibernate 6 was released on 2022-03-31 with many new features and enhancements. The Hibernate 6 is released nearly Six-and-a-half years after the release of the very popular Hibernate 5.0. Now, the Hibernate 6.0 is very important for the developers and this version of Hibernate is coming with many new features required for the development of today?s demanding enterprise applications. Hibernate ORM (object-relational mapping) is a very popular ORM tool and is being developed by Red Hat. Hibernate 6 is a major release by the Red Hat team, this version of ORM is the support for the Jakarta Persistence 3.0 specification.
In this post we are going to understand the new features of Hibernate 6. Hibernate is released with tons of work to produce more features and enhancements to the framework. The Red Hat team put a lot of effort in many areas of the Hibernate 6 framework to make Hibernate more stronger and feature rich. Hibernate 6 is released with more features after being developed by the Red Hat team. In this post we will see the new features and updates that come with Hibernate 6.
Here are the new features of Hibernate 6.0:
Java Persistence API is replaced with Jakarta Persistence 3.0 specification
In Hibernate 6.0 , Java persistence is removed and it is replaced with Jakarta Persistence 3.0 specification, which is a part of Jakarta EE. So, the javax.persistence package is no longer available and it is replaced with the jakarta.persistence package. If you are migrating your app from Hibernate 5.x then you have to replace the javax.persistence package with jakarta.persistence package in your code. You also have to import the jakarta.persistence package in the Java code of your Hibernate Project.
For reading data from ResultSet read-by-position method is uses instead of read-by-name
In JDBC Result is used to get the data from the underlying database and there are two methods of reading the data from it:
- read-by-position
- read-by-name
The read-by-name is very popular among developers and this method is used in Hibernate 5 or earlier. Due to this there is performance lag in the application. In Hibernate 6.0 major upgradation is done to use the read-by-position method for reading data from ResultSet.
In the Hibernate 5 or earlier read-by-name method was used for reading the data from resultset. The read-by-name method of reading data from ResultSet is slow and causes performance degradation. While the read-by-position method is very fast and gives high performance. So, to improve the performance in Hibernate 6.0 read-by-position method is used. This gives greater improvement in performance in the application developed using the Hibernate 6.0 or above ORM framework.
Due to changes made to Hibernate 6.0 to use the read-by-position in ResultSet many other Hibernate Type systems are changed. The change includes the removal of all things related to string-based approaches. The @AnyMetaDef, @AnyMetaDefs, @TypeDef and @TypeDefs deprecated annotations have been removed in Hibernate 6.0. If you are migrating from old Hibernate to Hibernate 6.0 you will have to remove @AnyMetaDef, @AnyMetaDefs, @TypeDef and @TypeDefs deprecated annotations from your code. Hibernate 6.0 annotations are also redesigned to achieve better type safety. So, Hibernate 6.0 is more powerful than previous Hibernate versions, so, developers should migrate their code to Hibernate 6.0 to take these advantages.
Hibernate 6.0 Compatibility
Java Compatibility:
Hibernate is compatible with the latest Java versions, which will help developers in taking advantage of latest versions of Java. Hibernate 6.x is compatible with the Java versions 11, 17 and 18.
Persistence API compatibility:
Hibernate is a persistence provider and it actually interacts with the underlying database. Hibernate 6 is now moved to use the Jakarta Persistence API and it is compatible with the 3.1 and 3.0 Jakarta Persistence API.
Hibernate 6.0 JDBC Performance
As explained above Hibernate 6.0 is now using read-by-position strategery for reading from JDBC ResultSet. This is a significant change and improves the performance of applications developed using Hibernate 6.0.
HQL Translation Performance in Hibernate 6.0
Hibernate is a framework that relies on Antlr for its HQL translation. Hibernate 6.0 upgraded the Antlr from version v2 to Antlr v4. Antlr v4 is the latest version and it comes with the performance improvements, this way Hibernate 6.0 is now giving performance enhancements. This version of Hibernate refactored the grammars, making it more efficient.
Criteria Translation with Semantic Query Model (SQM)
This is another improvement in Hibernate 6.0 which makes this version of Hibernate more useful as it gives more performance improvement.
In the previous version of Hibernate ORM framework, JPA Criteria queries used the rendering technique in which it was rendered as an HQL query, due to this there is low performance. In Hibernate 6.0 changes are made to translate HQL and Criteria, both into the same Semantic Query Model (SQM). This way Hibernate 6.0 archives more efficiency.
In Hibernate 6.0, JPQL & HQL and Criteria API are translated into SQM, which finally generates SQL for targeted databases. This more efficiency is achieved in Hibernate 6.0.
Enhancements
Hibernate is the most popular and efficient ORM tool in Java which is being used by a large number of developers around the world. Despite its popularity, Hibernate has other issues like scalability, native data structure access through dialects specific to the database, common performance issues and ease of use. Many of these issues are addressed in the Hibernate 6.0 and it is still improving.
Removal of legacy Criteria API
In this release the legacy Criteria API of Hibernate is removed and now solely supports Jakarta Persistence API.
Introduction to a new @Incubating annotation
In Hibernate 6.0 a new @Incubating annotation is added and it is all about warning the users that the particular feature is an incubating state which may change in the future.
Summary
Hibernate 6.0 was developed with a huge change in the way it works and now it comes with better performance, many new features and support for the latest versions of Java. As it is supporting the latest version of Java, developers can use all the latest features of Java.
There is greater opportunity for future development with the help of new features of Java.
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