I think calling Hibernate "a wrapper around JDBC" is overreaching. A wrapper brings to mind (at least to me) this idea of a thin layer, mostly a simple translator between two worlds, but in this case there's tons of added complexity and pitfalls on top of JDBC, and there's the whole ORM deal with attending object-relational impedance mismatch, the whole "ORM is the Vietnam of Computer Science", and a completely different can of worms!