Our PHB is unhappy with the fact that we use Hibernate for our products because he comes from a stored procedure background and feels they are faster. Now, I don't feel we have any need for stored procedures and since I started to use Hibernate I've sworn never to go back to straight JDBC ever again.

Anyway, us developers need some firepower. Please tell me that the PHB is talking out of his backside and there would be no worthwhile performance gain from using JDBC/stored procedures in an app that really doesn't need it.

The discussion was bourne from problems with MySQL Connector/J having issues with UTF-8 encoded content. Well, we've learned things and I don't see why, just because MySQL is a completely retarded suite of half-arsed DBMS products, we should switch to JBDC.

I should say pure JDBC for SQL Server - rather than a database independent implementation.

Introduce your PHB to the concept of "prepared statements". Be sure he is seated before you do.

If that doesn't work, Hibernate 3 does support stored procedures and native SQL. It will be pointless and stupid, but sometimes you have to sacrifice to keep the PHBs happy. Just be glad you don't have to give up Hibernate entirely.

If they do make you give up Hibernate entirely, then you've made an error in how you presented it. Your first instinct when presenting Hibernate is to present it as a revolutionary godsend, which it is, but this is bad. PHBs don't like revolutionary godsends, so you should ideally not mention it at all, as if it were just another .jar in your classpath. Would you gush about including commons-beanutils in your project? Probably not, because commons-beanutils is pretty mundane -- you just have to spin it as if hibernate.jar is the same thing. At least you learned your lesson for next time ;_;

Yes, if I recall correctly (not 100% sure I do, so verify elsewhere), the SQL Server implementation of prepared statements is that it creates an actual stored procedure on the database.

Hibernate != dynamic SQL :-)

This was true on earlier versions of SQL Server, but no longer since SQLServer 2000, they now have native support for prepared statements.

And of course, this is faster than the extra temporary stored procedure creation :-)

Thanks for that guys. I suppose as a Java developer these are things I should have known - but there are only so many hours in the day and work, relaxation and sleep must fit into it all.