What we can expect from Hibernate OGM and data persistence in 2015

Back in early 2013, TheServerSide spoke with Emmanuel Bernard, a Red Hat senior principal software engineer and data platform architect about the future of Hibernate vs JPA, especially in light of the growing popularity of various NoSQL and big data solutions that were being integrated into many modern enterprise architectures. The JBoss Hibernate OGM project greatly simplified the process of mapping object oriented Java systems to relational back ends, all while working to standardize and simplify the process through the emergence of the Java Persistence API (JPA) and the addition of highly useful annotations to the specification. But the pressing question remained: Could the big brains at Red Hat do the same thing for big data systems that they did for relational systems, and develop a process that simplified and potentially even consolidated the manner in which enterprise applications interact with the various NoSQL stores available on the market?

The news is good, and the Hibernate Object/Grid Mapper (OGM) project is byte-code proof of the fact that the initial vision of providing JPA support for NoSQL solutions wasn't a Quixotic one. By twisting and bending the Hibernate Core libraries that ORM developers have grown to know and love, OGM makes it possible to persist entities into various NoSQL systems, such as key-value stores like Infinispan, document databases like MongoDB and even graph databases like Neo4j. And while the JPA standard is at the heart of the project, there are those inevitable times when something a bit more customized is required, which is when developers can turn to various Hibernate OGM-specific libraries and options.

TheServerSide recently spoke with Bernard about the Hibernate OGM project and how it has progressed since it was initially envisioned back in 2011. In the associated podcast, you can find out more about Hibernate OGM and hear Bernard answer the following questions about where data persistence is going in 2015 and beyond:

• What's new with Hibernate Search, ORM, Hibernate vs JDBC and OGM?
• Has the work you have done on mapping NoSQL to JPA given you new ideas for re-architecting some of the past work that has been done on Hibernate Search and Hibernate ORM?
• What has adoption been like for Hibernate Search, Hibernate JDBC, Hibernate ORM and Hibernate OGM?
• What are the two or three key benefits organizations will realize by using a tool like Hibernate OGM, as opposed to standard NoSQL data access mechanisms?
• What do you see as the future of JDBC persistence? What is the future of document stores, relational stores, NoSQL databases and the like? How will this industry mature, and where is the industry going?
• What can we look forward to in the future with Hibernate tools and data persistence in Java?

Follow Emmanuel Bernard on Twitter @emmanuelbernard