Hibernate Vs JDBC Performance

==< The Hibernate advantage over JDBC >==

Concurrency Support

In JDBC there is no check that always every user has updated data this check has to be added by the developer.
Hibernate maintains this concurrency check using a version field.It checks this version field in the database table before every update operation.

So, if two users retrieve data from the same table and modify it and if one of them saves the modification, the version gets updated. Now when the second user tries to save his data hibernate doesn't allow it because the data he retrieved was modified and his version doesn't match with the version in the database.

Caching and Connection Pooling

In JDBC, caching and connection pooling is maintained by hand-coding.
Hibernate provides excellent caching support and connection pooling for better application performance.

Transaction Management

In JDBC one has to explicitly handle transaction management in the code.
Hibernate provides injected transaction management.

Programming Overhead

In JDBC one has to do a lot of coding in the form of SQL queries to handle persistant data in database.
In Hibernate there is no need to write code in the form of SQL queries to save and retrieve the data, thus reduces programming overhead and development time.

Maintenance Costs

Applications using JDBC contain large amounts of code that handles database persistant data. This code is subjected to changes whenever there is a change in database table structure leading to high maintenance cost.

In Hibernate the actual mapping between database tables and program objects is done in a XML descriptor file. So any changes to a database table will only need a change in the XML file resulting in centralized maintenance and reduction of maintenance costs.