I guess you should have a look here if not already done :
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... batch.html
I think ORM tools are not the best tools to do loads of batch inserts, or generally batch operations. Batch can be done, but they must be handled with a lot of attention.
Moreover, it depends on what type of business operations you do. If you need to just send SQL queries, even complicated, but do not need to load your objects, maybe you don't need an ORM. But if you must do some objects code, because of your business code being quite complex, then ORM could be better than jdbc.
I never used it, but maybe you could try StatelessSession which is designed for handling batch (no first level cache) ops.
So it depends on what is your business constraints, I'd say. To sum up, IMO :
* lots of complex business operations => ORM can go, but with a lot of care about the cache size (flushing(), clearing() regularly, or using no cache with StatelessSession for example)
* Only sql queries are sent, and operations are quite feasible with SQL only, then forget about ORM.
HTH