Our Oracle DBA has noticed that the database is soft parsing each SQL statement issued by our Hibernate-based application. We are using Hibernate for batch processing - almost exclusively inserts - and he is concerned that the accumalitve effect of these soft parses is having a detrimental effect on performance. Is this behaviour expected, or is there some way to force Hibernate to reuse prepared statements? Note, we recently switched to using Apache DBCP with prepared statement caching enabled but according to our DBA, this hasn't reduced the number of soft parses. Any insights into this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Please, help me understanding that article.
It means that when I launch statistics on my production Database, and I see that for every statement generated by Hibernate

these are all soft parse ?
I made some experiment with Oracle drivers, and setting this property on the connection that I get from the pool:

I obtain

for every statement !!!!
If I understood well, this mean that with this Oracle Driver can let me skip also the soft parsing of SQL ?
I would like to understand......

In short hard parsing includes query plan calculation, soft parsing doe's not need to recalculate plan, but it needs to parse SQL, cache lookup and related locking is expensive anyway (hard parsing is more expensive). Solution to avoid soft parse is to cache cursors in session scope, oracle doe's this itself on server side (session_cached_cursors parameter). Good practice is to reuse statement objects in session or transaction scope, probably JDBC pools can help too.

Thank you baliukas for your fast response.
I solved the problem, without reusing cursors on the client side, using JDBC 3.0 style of implicit caching and that worked great, NO more soft parsing too !!!!!
Now I'm rewriting Hibernate's DataSourceConnection class to use this and take the best of this feature.
Do you have any more suggestion ?

check cursor limits in init.ora file, "Too many open cursors" error is very common with cursor cache.