In my never-ending search for a Persistency Framework, I discovered Hibernate as being a real jewel and treasured it for long. But recent discussions with a brother-in-coding lead me to the following question(s).

Why do I need a persistency framework at all? Suppose one had limitless memory, -speed and addressing space. Then you would not need to persist parts of the objects to a database. But then you'd lose the ability to query (comes standard with relational databases and Hibernate abstracts this perfectly). Generic OQL would replace such functionality. But why is this not part of the Java framework? I can build large collections of objects but are not able to query as Hibernate does for its persisted data. But why not have an OQL-like facility in Java embedded?
And what about persisting the data? (And the close relationship it has with topics as caching, etc). If I would fully abstract this from all applications, I could treat it as the memory swapping facility of any OS. Does this make sense or am I totally out of this universe?

Is there anyone else that is thinking about the same kind of things?

Greetz,
Wolfgang

P.S. What you talk about is called an "object-oriented database management system", which is what people used in the 60's before the relational model was invented by Dr. Codd at IBM. The book URL I've posted gives you the necessary background to understand why this transition happened and also teaches you the basics that you need to make a decision today for either approach. It's not a small book, but its a must-read for anyone working in data management.