Stardust supports the following data types that allow the integration within a process:
Serializable data types and Entity Bean data types are Java style data types. They both have their pros and cons. Serialization is a quick method to use objects for your process data. Stardust serializes these objects as whole in the Audit Trail. The disadvantages using serialization are clear. You have to care of different class versions and Stardust have to de-serialize all objects of a type to search for an attribute you have for example defined as descriptor. The Entity Bean Data Type stores only the primary key in the Audit Trail. Stardust does not care of how to persist the object. The EJB container (cmp) or rather yourself (bmp) is responsible to persist the object. But the use of Entity Beans means also the use of a heavyweight persistence framework.
Hibernate is a popular object-oriented persistence layer. Hibernate makes it possible to shorten the gap between object-oriented and relational concepts without giving up powerful features that come with the relational technology. For detailed information about Hibernate, visit www.hibernate.org.
The Hibernate Data Type is a good alternative for the two approaches above. Stardust also stores only the identifier of a Hibernate object into the Audit Trail. The object will be persisted by the Hibernate persistence layer. You have to configure Hibernate as you have to do it anyway. The advantage over the Entity Bean Data Type is the fact that Hibernate offers a more object-oriented approach. You can map is-a relationships as subclasses.
All of these approaches suffer when it comes to queries on the process instance data (as for example if used as descriptors). The engine has to de-serialize/load all entities to evaluate them. So it is not recommended (but possible) to create descriptors on these data types. It is recommended to save descriptor values in primitive or structured data so access to these data is quite fast and efficient. Please also note that sorting is not supported on descriptor values on these data types (Serialization, Entity Bean, Hibernate).