My personal opinion is that adopting hibernate as a persistence strategy doesnt save any time or effort.

For example, you still have to manually map the objects and their properties to a relational database in the mapping file.

and dont come back with any rubbish about automatic generation of the mapping file. Any one who has used hibernate in anger will agree that to do real world stuff these tools simply dont cut the mustard. In fact, I often have to revert to sql if I want to optmise the database design with indexes and the like.

Yes it is a persitence strategy and yes it does work (albeit with a few issues on account of it still being relatively new), but it doesnt bring anything to the table over and above a decent JDBC DAO strategy and some common sense mapping between objects and the relational database design.

my advice is learn SQL rather than hibernate, it'll be of more use to you in the long run.

How To Ask For Help
Before posting
Follow our guidelines. If you are new to Hibernate, follow our road map for new users. It is not a good idea to ignore this - data persistence is a complex topic and you will get lost quickly if you try to explore it on your own.
Read the free Hibernate in Action chapters. Read chapter 2 for an alternative quickstart tutorial and setup instructions.
Consult the documentation. An amazing amount of questions on the Hibernate forum (more than 50 per day of a total of more than 100) can be answered with a simple look in the reference documentation, the available demo applications, or one of the dozens of articles and tutorials. Don't be surprised if you get a simple link or a grumpy response if you haven't read anything.
Search! Don't think that posting is faster than searching for the information yourself. Not many people will share your view. An amazing number of posters haven't searched the forum, the website, or even the reference documentation. Nothing degrades the forum signal/noise ratio more than seeing the same questions over and over.
Read the FAQ. This is a no-brainer. Most forum questions are already answered in the FAQs.
Use the Hibernate log. There is an enormous amount of information to be gleaned from the Hibernate log and you will learn a lot about how Hibernate works if you get familiar with it. Learning about the log messages will help you resolve future problems more quickly. See the reference documentation for instructions on enabling logging. Quick instructions: copy log4.jar and log4j.properties from Hibernate to your classpath, modify the properties to enable more output.
Consult the Hibernate tests. The unit tests that come bundled with Hibernate in the org.hibernate.test package have been written to be understandable examples. Included are almost all possible mapping situations and API examples and we used non-abstract use cases for most of our tests. Please consult this source code and the many mapping files before posting on the forum.
Isolate the problem. Of course you should first isolate your problem before posting, down to the minimum number of classes and mapping files that are needed to reproduce the issue. Usually you will have found the problem after doing this yourself.
Use your debugger. An amazingly huge number of problems can be solved incredibly quickly by just putting a break point in the right place. Hibernate is open source, so you can can put the Hibernate source in your IDE sourcepath and step into Hibernate code if necessary.
Try to resolve the problem yourself. It is much quicker for you to find out as much about your problem than to wait while someone on the other side of the world responds to your questions with more questions. ≈
When posting
Give as much information as possible. Don't ignore the bullet points in the text field, fill out the required information. Yes, everything is needed in almost all cases.
Format your post. Reading an unformatted post is a pain. Especially use 'quote' and 'code' formatters.
Don't blame Hibernate. 99% of posts titled "bug in Hibernate" are simple user error. This is very annoying for all of us.
Don't insult Hibernate or the people who worked hard to develop it. You want an answer to your problem, right? Insulting people is a really bad way to get it.
After posting
Keep trying to solve your problem. Even after posting, you still have responsibility for your problem, because you are the one being paid to solve it.
RTFM is a completely valid response to your question. If you are told to read the documentation, do it! Nobody will quote and copy/paste the documentation.
If no-one answered your question, it was probably your fault. Try to explain yourself better next time. Perhaps nobody has time to answer your question. Very likely you did not follow the rules in "Before Posting" before you posted. If you need guaranteed response times from Hibernate experts, consider our commercial support offerings.
Don't "bump up" your posting. The biggest problem on every high traffic forum are "bump up" postings made by people who think they are special and really really deserve an answer. Don't ask every few hours why nobody answers you, see previous point.

How To Read a Post

read the post
try to understand the point of view being expressed
do not just cut and paste some useless info from the hibernate web site in the hope that someone will award you a credit