Hibernate is a simple, flexible and powerful ORM framework to map Java classes to database tables. Hibernate itself takes care of this mapping using XML files so developer does not need to write code for this.

Benefits of Hibernate are:

1. Supports POJO based persistence
2. Is database Independent
3. Supports powerful query language Hibernate Query Language (HQL) which is database independent. This is expressed in a familiar SQL like syntax and includes full support for polymorphic queries. Hibernate also supports native SQL statements.
4. Supports Inheritance, Association and Relationships
5. Provides powerful Hibernate Cache which helps in increasing the application performance
6. Provides improved Performance and maintainability