Can we use hibernate with spring web flux

Question

I am new to reactive programming I have started using webflux, previously I work on spring boot there I have used hibernate as a ORM framework. My doubt is what is replace of hibernate in reactive stack , which framework I have to use to connect & implement database logic. I am using mongoDB.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

you have to use either R2DBC or Hibernate reactive. if you migrating an old service from spring boot to webflux, I recommended you to use Hibernate reactive.

when you use R2DBC, you can't use hibernate mappings and annotations.

according to hibernate reactive documentation:

When using a stateless session, you should be aware of the following additional limitations:

• persistence operations never cascade to associated instances,
• changes to @ManyToMany associations and @ElementCollections cannot be made persistent, and
• operations performed via a stateless session bypass callbacks.

Answer 2

Hibernate is based on JDBC. JDBC is blocking. Blocking APIs don't work well in reactive stacks. Also, Hibernate under the hood uses ThreadLocals which makes it even worse candidate for reactive applications.

For Webflux, as the alternative to Hibernate you should look into Spring Data R2DBC which does the basic database result to Java object mapping, but keep in mind that it's not a full fledge ORM like Hibernate.

You may also want to give it a try to Hibernate Reactive. With this you can use the power of Hibernate mappings in a reactive non blocking way. One thing that will not work though (at least not yet) is declarative transaction management with @Transactional.