I wasn't able to find any information on whether Hibernate can run in a non-database (file system) environment, so I'm assuming probably not. Considering the powerful queries it supports I'm assuming that it probably requires the query capabilities of a SQL-based database.

However, it doesn't hurt to ask...does Hibernate support a file system based repository? Any plans to?

Thanks.

You would have to implement such a thing yourself, using a custom persister.


But, why not just use HSQL? It's just SQL on top of flat files, after all...

Good suggestion. I wasn't aware of HSQL, but it looks like a good solution. It even supports a memory-only db which would work quite nicely for our design-time testing scenario.

Thanks!