Hibernate – Types of Mapping

Hibernate is a Java framework that simplifies the development of Java applications to interact with the database. It is an open-source, lightweight, ORM (Object Relational Mapping) tool. Hibernate implements the specifications of JPA (Java Persistence API) for data persistence.

There are different relations that we maintain to establish a link between different database tables in relational database models. These relations are one to one, one to many, and many to many. A similar concept is being installed in hibernate. Here the hibernate works to link the JAVA language to the database table along with this link we can establish relations/mappings. 

The main basic types of mapping are: 

1. Primitive Types
2. Date and Time Types
3. Binary and Large Object Types
4. JDK-related Types

So, let us discuss each of the above 4 listed mapping types in detail as follows:

A. Primitive Types 

These types of mapping have data types defined as “integer”, “character”, “float”, “string”, “double”, “Boolean”, “short”, “long” etc. These are present in hibernate framework to map java data type to RDBMS data type.        

B. Date and Time

These are “date”, “time”, “calendar”, “timestamp” etc. Like primitive we have these date and time datatype mappings.

C. Binary and large objects 

These types are “clob”, “blob”, “binary”, “text” etc. Clob and blob data types are present to maintain the data type mapping of large objects like images and videos.

D. JDK linked

Some of the mappings for objects which lie beyond the reach of the previous type of mappings are included in this category. These are “class”, “locale”, “currency”, “timezone”.