This document introduces Hibernate and is organized into the following sections: a brief history of relational databases; the object oriented paradigm; the problem with using plain JDBC for object relational mapping; solutions like Hibernate; a demo of Hibernate's CRUD capabilities; what Hibernate tools can do; Hibernate's object lifecycle management; how Hibernate has been incorporated into standards like EJB3 and JPA; and information about where to find more resources and the presenter.