In this chapter, we explained how to integrate Hibernate into your Java application. We also detailed the configuration options for Hibernate, including the available Hibernate property settings. We recommended using the hibernate.cfg.xml XML configuration for Hibernate because it offers the ability to configure mapping files instead of configuring the mapping files in Java code. Naming strategies allow you to create a consistent company or application-wide database table-naming convention, and they also give you the ability to easily map your Hibernate classes to databases with existing naming conventions. Hibernate uses dialects to define different behaviors for different databases—each database has its own feature set and SQL compatibility quirks, and Hibernate provides built-in support for most common relational databases.