One observation - seems you can almost predict people's preference for Hibernate or Ibatis (or something else) based on whether they are "application folk", who

One observation - seems you can almost predict people's preference for Hibernate or Ibatis (or something else) based on whether they are "application folk", who see the DB as just the persistence mechanism, or whether they view the DB as the "critical data store" with the application used to get and store that data. Despite being very much an app developer myself, not a DBA or particularly a DB development guy, I've seen DBs outlast many apps, coding languages etc, and always feel it's the most important thing at the end of the day. Depends on your domain too I guess, I'm sure there are many important exceptions.