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Spring Data JPA vs Hibernate : Where are the implementation of methods in JPARepository?

July 5, 2022

I’m new to JPA and Hibernate. I understand that Hibernate is a implementation of JPA but Spring Data JPA is a JPA Data Access Abstraction (and not an implementation of JPA).

But

StudentRepository.java

@Repository
public interface StudentRepository extends JpaRepository<Student,Integer>{

}

Routing in Controller class

@GetMapping("/all")
    public List<Student> listAllStudents(){
        List listOfStudents = studentRepo.findAll();
        return listOfStudents;
    }

The above code works fine. (Full code and other classes not added to reduce verbosity.)
I haven’t added Hibernate or any other JPA implementation, I have just used Spring data JPA. But the code works fine (as shown in many tutorials in the web).

This is the dependency of Spring data JPA and I’m using.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
    <version>2.6.7</version>
</dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.mariadb.jdbc</groupId>
        <artifactId>mariadb-java-client</artifactId>
        <scope>runtime</scope>
    </dependency>

What confuses me is if I haven’t used any JPA implementation, how does this code work? Where is the implementation of the code?

In logs I could see things related to Hibernate although I haven’t added Hibernate dependency or used used anything from Hibernate directly.

2022-07-05 10:55:59.470  INFO 13332 --- [  restartedMain] org.hibernate.Version                    : HHH000412: Hibernate ORM core version 5.6.9.Final
2022-07-05 10:55:59.729  INFO 13332 --- [  restartedMain] o.hibernate.annotations.common.Version   : HCANN000001: Hibernate Commons Annotations {5.1.2.Final}
2022-07-05 10:55:59.899  INFO 13332 --- [  restartedMain] org.hibernate.dialect.Dialect            : HHH000400: Using dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.MariaDB106Dialect

Does it indirectly use Hibernate somehow?

PS: Sorry, if the question is naive, I’m trying to understand how this is working.

Edit : Full code : https://github.com/TMGautham/SpringBootFirst

>Solution :

The spring-boot-starter-data-jpa includes Hibernate. The starters are, as the name implies, starters to make it easier for you to start. So this starter includes