Book excerpt: The Definitive Guide to Today’s Leading Persistence Technologies Persistence in the Enterprise is a unique, up-to-date, and objective guide to building the persistence layers of enterprise applications. Drawing on their extensive experience, five leading IBM® Web development experts carefully review the issues and tradeoffs associated with persistence in large-scale, business-critical applications. The authors offer a pragmatic, consistent comparison of each leading framework--both proprietary and open source. Writing for IT managers, architects, administrators, developers, and testers, the authors address a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from coding complexity and flexibility to scalability and licensing. In addition, they demonstrate each framework side by side, via a common example application. With their guidance, you’ll learn how to define your persistence requirements, choose the most appropriate solutions, and build systems that maximize both performance and value. Coverage includes Taking an end-to-end application architecture view of persistence Understanding business drivers, IT requirements, and implementation issues Driving your persistence architecture via functional, nonfunctional, and domain requirements Modeling persistence domains Mapping domain models to relational databases Building a yardstick for comparing persistence frameworks and APIs Selecting the right persistence technologies for your applications Comparing JDBCTM, Apache iBATIS, Hibernate Core, Apache OpenJPA, and pureQuery The companion web site includes sample code that implements the common example used throughout the technology evaluation chapters, 5-9. The IBM Press developerWorks® Series is a unique undertaking in which print books and the Web are mutually supportive. The publications in this series are complemented by resources on the developerWorks Web site on ibm.com. Icons throughout the book alert the reader to these valuable resources.