Java's I/O streams provide standardized ways to read and write data. Any object representing a mutable data source in Java exposes methods for reading and writing its data as a stream.

Write, build, and run an example application that persists data to and from a relational database using Hibernate, JPA, and the repository pattern.

Not all developers want to write bit-banging, byte-level code. But the option opens up the data stream to elaborate transformations that go well beyond what is possible with SQL.