I've moved away from ORMs in Java because they don't really solve the problem faced. Hibernate could be a really good solution to providing a blanket system for SQL interaction except for the performance issues. If one was really using Domain objects (not pojos, or dumb DTOs) the typing ability of Hibernate would be great. Unfortunately for simple CRUD apps the issues presented by Hibernate (like loading it in an EAR) are such that it requires too much maintenance time on complex projects.
I know that I've used Hibernate for years. I've used it with DTOs. I know that it does provide a certain benefit for simple reads and writes. Unfortunately, Hibernate was designed to work in a disconnected manner like the Web. As a result you get into complications of session management. This is just one example of Hibernate maintenance costs.
Now I use Spring JDBC. This removes the noise of the checked exceptions, connection management, transactions, just like Hibernate. But I write simple or complex SQL in one place and map in and out contently.
Well, I can't speak to Java here but NHibernate works fantastic. I've checked the generated SQL on complex joins and it always ended up writing what I would have by hand.
In C# the session management is no big deal: you access everything via the Repository pattern, turn on trait injection and just make sure any repository method that will need a session has a transaction attribute. If you need to do a series of read/writes in one transaction you throw that whole method into the repository class and put a transaction trait on that method.
It's not. I create a DTO and I set up an exact mapping of how that appears in the database. Then I create a type generic Repository pattern that makes the DB access explicit as opposed to NHibernate's magic database access. Then the rest is just one time wiring I set up so I don't have to worry about actually connecting to the DB in my code.
In any solution you come up with you'll either need a repository that handles sessions and so on, or you'll have to explicitly connect to the db every time you need it. Either case will be more work than what I've done with this solution.
I know that I've used Hibernate for years. I've used it with DTOs. I know that it does provide a certain benefit for simple reads and writes. Unfortunately, Hibernate was designed to work in a disconnected manner like the Web. As a result you get into complications of session management. This is just one example of Hibernate maintenance costs.
Now I use Spring JDBC. This removes the noise of the checked exceptions, connection management, transactions, just like Hibernate. But I write simple or complex SQL in one place and map in and out contently.