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Why Hibernate is Better Than JDBC — Key Advantages and Examples
Discover the top reasons to choose Hibernate over JDBC for database interaction in Java. Learn about code simplicity, transactions, exception handling, HQL, caching, and more with real-world examples.
5 min readApr 4, 2025
Working with databases in Java used to mean one thing: JDBC. It was simple, raw, and effective — but it came with a price: boilerplate, repetitive exception handling, and lack of flexibility.
Then came Hibernate — a modern Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework that made database interaction feel more natural and Java-like.
If you’ve been using JDBC and are wondering why so many developers prefer Hibernate, this article is for you.
Let’s explore the major advantages of Hibernate over JDBC — with explanations and examples.
1️⃣ Hibernate Removes Boilerplate Code
With JDBC, we need to manually:
- Open/close connections
- Prepare statements
- Execute queries
- Handle exceptions and result sets
Let’s look at a simple example using JDBC:
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(DB_URL);
PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement("SELECT * FROM users");
ResultSet rs =…
