Hibernating in the Cloud - Implementation and Evaluation of Object-NoSQL-Mapping

Object-relational mappers such as Hibernate are often used in applications to persist business objects in relational databases. The availability of commercial cloud-based database services opens new opportunities for developing and deploying database applications. In addition, highly scalable cloud services belong to the class of NoSQL systems promising to avoid the paradigm mismatch between the objectoriented programming model and the relational backend. In this paper, we discuss and analyze the usage of a scalable NoSQL solution such as Basho’s RIAK as backend for Hibernate. We describe the necessary mapping and translation steps for an integration avoiding the detour on SQL. Finally, we present results of an experimental evaluation showing the benefits and limitations of this class of NoSQL backends for object-relational mappers.