The main advantage of ORM like hibernate is that it shields developers from messy SQL. Apart from this, ORM provides following benefits:

► Improved productivity

* High-level object-oriented API

* Less Java code to write

* No SQL to write

► Improved performance

* Sophisticated caching

* Eager loading

► Improved maintainability

* A lot less code to write

► Improved portability

* ORM framework generates database-specific SQL for you