Performance Comparison of Hibernate and EclipseLink Technologies for Mapping an Object-Oriented Model to a Relational Database

Different tiers of modern applications are built using object-oriented programming for implementing business logic and the relational database model for data storage. To solve the impendence mismatch issue that arises between the object model and relational schema, various Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools have been designed. In this research, the performance of two open source ORM technologies, namely Hibernate and EclipseLink, is investigated. Hibernate is a well established middleware solution while EclipseLink, which stems from Oracle’s TopLink, is a new product on the persistence landscape. For the purpose of this research, a web-based application was developed and used as a test system. The performance test facilities were integrated into design of the application. The abstract layer introduced into application’s architecture with the Spring Data Access Object (DAO), made the system highly modular allowing easily switching between persistence technologies with no alterations in the rest of the application code