Hibernate: Myths & Over-Engineering. ORMs vs SQL vs Hexagonal — Gavin King | The Marco Show

Gavin King (creator of Hibernate; now at IBM, formerly Red Hat/JBoss) joins Marco to slice through decades of ORM dogma. From “repositories per entity” and lazy loading pain to stateless sessions, DRY as commandment #1, Jakarta Data, and why you should often just write a SQL query (or even better, a database view) for real-world legacy schemas. It’s pragmatic persistence for Java developers who ship.

What you’ll learn:
– When a single SQL (or a DB view) beats layers of repositories
– The 3 inheritance mapping strategies (and why table-per-class hurts)
– Why DRY is more than architecture astronautics; let design emerge via refactoring
– Stateless Session vs stateful: fewer surprises, fewer “magical” bugs
– How Jakarta Data 1.0/1.1 departs from Spring Data (and why that helps)
– Handling legacy schemas, performance, and the truth about “leaky abstractions”
– Sensible rules of thumb for SQL & round-trips
– LazyInitializationException: friend, not foe (and how to avoid it)

🎁 Giveaway
If you could add one exciting new feature to Hibernate (anything at all, even wild or AI-powered) what would it be? Reply in the comments with your idea.
The most creative answer wins either a JetBrains merchstore coupon or a free 1-year license to your favorite JetBrains product.

⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 Teaser
01:00 Gavin King intro and early Hibernate motivation
03:59 Old-school open-source culture and discovery
08:39 SQL isn’t hard: minimize DB round-trips
10:03 “Leaky abstractions are good” (and why)
12:04 Architecture should emerge from code
15:44 DRY as commandment #1
22:05 Reviewing a typical Spring Data setup (and pitfalls)
25:39 Inheritance strategies: joined vs single table vs table-per-class
30:06 One screen? Just write a SQL query (pragmatism)
33:08 When ORM shines: operations over graphs
35:22 Use views to adapt messy legacy schemas
43:18 Jakarta Data repos: annotation-driven, step-into-able
44:59 Stateless Session: less magic, explicit updates
48:51 Jakarta Data 1.1: stateful repos, dynamic queries, reactive
1:24:22 Rapid fire questions
1:33:15 Features Gavin would delete and lessons learned
1:42:30 Giveaway

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