Why was the name "Hibernate" chosen for Java's Hibernate library?

Question

Does the term "hibernate" mean something specific with regard to ORM libraries? Is there a story behind it?

Answer 1

I doubt you'll find anything authoritative on the matter, but I would say it's a logical choice. When you sleep, you can wake up pretty easily, and will do so within a shorter amount of time than if you were to hibernate (I'm pretending you are a bear right now). Since sleep and hibernate are similar, manufacturers probably wanted to extend the metaphor.

EDIT: Well shoot, now it's about a Java library. So much for my bear theories.

Answer 2

My WAG: your entities "hibernate" in the database when they're not in use.

Answer 3

It's pretty clear to me.

An object is sent to hibernation to a RDBMS, when it comes back ( if it does ) it wakes up from his hibernation.

Sleep as "Cinder6" says , is a short term "wait"; much more like the serialization process, your object gets to sleep and wakes up in another node ( or VM )

If an object is sent to a DB it may wait for a week, a month, a year, before it gets fetched again hence it was sent to hibernation.

Answer 4

Hibernate is about "replacing direct persistence-related database accesses with high-level object handling functions". So it's about data that is sleeping in a database.