DataNucleus Access Platform, as stated at the official product site, is the most standards-compliant Open Source Java persistence product in existence. It is fully compliant with the JDO1, JDO2, JDO2.1,JDO2.2, JDO3, JPA1 and JPA2 Java standards. It also complies with the OGC Simple Feature Specification for persistence of geospatial Java types to RDBMS. It utilities an OSGi-based plugin mechanism meaning that it is extremely extensible.

Hibernate, as stated at the official “about” page of the product, is a high-performance Object/Relational persistence and query service. The most flexible and powerful Object/Relational solution on the market,Hibernate takes care of the mapping from Java classes to database tables and from Java data types to SQL data types. It provides data query and retrieval facilities that significantly reduce development time.

For the purpose of this article we will use the aforementioned, well known, products as the actual implementations of the persistence API. Our goal is to be able to compare their performance when applying CRUD (Create – Retrieve – Update – Delete) operations against a database.

Read more at :

DataNucleus 3.0 vs Hibernate 3.5 - Java Code Geeks

I think the popular ORM tools are all fast enough, except you implement orm anti-patterns.

Exactly - who cares :) Its good enough!

In my real world application they are very comparable for the majority of operations, however I often find queries that Hibernate has severe problems with, and performance goes off a cliff edge. Never had that with DataNucleus, and all later versions (2.1+) have never failed to compile my query into SQL, more than I can say for Hibernate.

The "test" presented in this link is hardly "real-world" and I'd like to see the authors favourite ORM compared against iBatis/myBatis on that case.

As anyone with a reasonable intellect would know, there are many use-cases where persistence solutions are employed. In many of these situations DataNucleus is actually faster than Hibernate. Why not look at this presentation for some other situations

http://vimeo.com/44789644

then you have more of a balanced coverage