Why do you need ORM tools like hibernate?

The main advantage of ORM like hibernate is that it shields developers from messy SQL. Apart from this, ORM provides following benefits:

• Improved productivity
  • High-level object-oriented API
  • Less Java code to write
  • No SQL to write
• Improved performance
  • Sophisticated caching
  • Lazy loading
  • Eager loading
• Improved maintainability
  • A lot less code to write
• Improved portability
  • ORM framework generates database-specific SQL for you