If you are a Java developer with some experience, you might know that Hibernate is an Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework. For those who don't know what Hibernate is, it is a powerful tool that lets you map a traditional Plain Old Java Object (POJO) to a traditional database table.

When we say traditional database, we are referring, in particular, to relational databases like Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server. Because of the great popularity of Hibernate, the Java Community Process (JCP) created the JPA specification as part of the JSR 220 for Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, totally inspired by the Hibernate framework. The following figure depicts the main components of the JPA architecture:

With the emergence of NoSQL solutions and its new paradigm for databases, many developers took advantage of this solution in their applications.

There are a number of NoSQL stores, which can be classified as follows: