The Data Access Object (DAO) support in Spring is primarily aimed at making it easy to work with data access technologies like JDBC, Hibernate or JDO in a standardized way. This allows one to switch between the aforementioned persistence technologies fairly easily and it also allows one to code without worrying about catching exceptions that are specific to each technology.

Spring provides a convenient translation from technology specific exceptions like SQLException to its own exception hierarchy with the DataAccessException as the root exception. These exceptions wrap the original exception so there is never any risk that one might lose any information as to what might have gone wrong.

In addition to JDBC exceptions, Spring can also wrap Hibernate-specific exceptions, converting them from proprietary, checked exceptions (in the case of versions of Hibernate prior to Hibernate 3.0), to a set of abstracted runtime exceptions (the same is true for JDO exceptions). This allows one to handle most persistence exceptions, which are non-recoverable, only in the appropriate layers, without annoying boilerplate catch and throw blocks, and exception declarations. (One can still trap and handle exceptions anywhere one needs to though.) As mentioned above, JDBC exceptions (including database-specific dialects) are also converted to the same hierarchy, meaning that one can perform some operations with JDBC within a consistent programming model.

The above holds true for the various template-based versions of the ORM access framework. If one uses the interceptor-based classes then the application must care about handling HibernateExceptions and JDOExceptions itself, preferably via delegating to SessionFactoryUtils' convertHibernateAccessException or convertJdoAccessException methods respectively. These methods convert the exceptions to ones that are compatible with the org.springframework.dao exception hierarchy. As JDOExceptions are unchecked, they can simply get thrown too, sacrificing generic DAO abstraction in terms of exceptions though.

The exception hierarchy that Spring uses is outlined in the following image:

(Please note that the class hierarchy detailed in the above image shows only a subset of the whole, rich, DataAccessException hierarchy.)

To make it easier to work with a variety of data access technologies such as JDBC, JDO and Hibernate in a consistent way, Spring provides a set of abstract DAO classes that one can extend. These abstract classes have methods for providing the data source and any other configuration settings that are specific to the technology one currently is using.

Dao support classes: