Hibernate and Spring Data JPA: Beginner to Guru

Hibernate is the default JPA implementation used by Spring Data JPA.

JPA stands for Java Persistence API. This is a common Java API used to work with Relational Databases.

Spring Data JPA is an abstraction built on top of the JPA API specification.

Being an abstraction, Spring Data JPA makes working with database entities very efficient.

Spring Data JPA eliminates a lot of the boilerplate / cerimonial code, and allows developers to focus on developing business logic.

The downside of the efficient abstraction is that accessing the database can become a mystery. Developers who just understand how to use Spring Data JPA do not understand the complexities of JDBC and Hibernate.

You will start this course with a basic demonstration of Spring Data JPA. In this section you will learn how to work with a H2 in–memory database.

You’ll see how easy it is to work with Spring Data JPA. You will also begin to understand how the Hibernate interaction is being abstracted away.

Since JPA is the Java API for working with Relational Databases, the course takes a closer look at Relational Databases and MySQL specifically.

MySQL is the most popular open source relational database in the world. You will learn how to configure Spring Boot to test with a H2 in–memory database and to run integration tests against a MySQL database. This is a common real–world example leveraging the power of Spring and Hibernate to give you a very flexible environment.