What is the difference between Hibernate and Spring Data JPA

I disagree SpringJPA makes live easy. Yes, it provides some classes and you can make some simple DAO fast, but in fact, it's all you can do. If you want to do something more than findById() or save, you must go through hell:

• no EntityManager access in org.springframework.data.repository classes (this is basic JPA class!)
• own transaction management (hibernate transactions disallowed)
• huge problems with more than one datasources configuration
• no datasource pooling (HikariCP must be in use as third party library)

Why own transaction management is an disadvantage? Since Java 1.8 allows default methods into interfaces, Spring annotation based transactions, simple doesn't work.

Unfortunately, SpringJPA is based on reflections, and sometimes you need to point a method name or entity package into annotations (!). That's why any refactoring makes big crash. Sadly, @Transactional works for primary DS only :( So, if you have more than one DataSources, remember - transactions works just for primary one :)

What are the main differences between Hibernate and Spring Data JPA?

Hibernate is JPA compatibile, SpringJPA Spring compatibile. Your HibernateJPA DAO can be used with JavaEE or Hibernate Standalone, when SpringJPA can be used within Spring - SpringBoot for example

When should we not use Hibernate or Spring Data JPA? Also, when may Spring JDBC template perform better than Hibernate / Spring Data JPA?

Use Spring JDBC only when you need to use much Joins or when you need to use Spring having multiple datasource connections. Generally, avoid JPA for Joins.

But my general advice, use fresh solution—Daobab (http://www.daobab.io). Daobab is my Java and any JPA engine integrator, and I believe it will help much in your tasks :)

Hibernate is a JPA implementation, while Spring Data JPA is a JPA data access abstraction. Spring Data JPA cannot work without a JPA provider.

Spring Data offers a solution to the DDD Repository pattern or the legacy GenericDao custom implementations. It can also generate JPA queries on your behalf through method name conventions.

With Spring Data, you may use Hibernate, EclipseLink, or any other JPA provider. A very interesting benefit of using Spring or Java EE is that you can control transaction boundaries declaratively using the @Transactional annotation.

Spring JDBC is much more lightweight, and it's intended for native querying, and if you only intend to use JDBC alone, then you are better off using Spring JDBC to deal with the JDBC verbosity.

Therefore, Hibernate and Spring Data are complementary rather than competitors.

There are 3 different things we are using here :

1. JPA : Java persistence api which provide specification for persisting, reading, managing data from your java object to relations in database.
2. Hibernate: There are various provider which implement jpa. Hibernate is one of them. So we have other provider as well. But if using jpa with spring it allows you to switch to different providers in future.
3. Spring Data JPA : This is another layer on top of jpa which spring provide to make your life easy.

So lets understand how spring data jpa and spring + hibernate works-

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Spring Data JPA:

Let's say you are using spring + hibernate for your application. Now you need to have dao interface and implementation where you will be writing crud operation using SessionFactory of hibernate. Let say you are writing dao class for Employee class, tomorrow in your application you might need to write similiar crud operation for any other entity. So there is lot of boilerplate code we can see here.

Now Spring data jpa allow us to define dao interfaces by extending its repositories(crudrepository, jparepository) so it provide you dao implementation at runtime. You don't need to write dao implementation anymore.Thats how spring data jpa makes your life easy.