Its purpose is to relieve the developer from a significant portion of relational data persistence-related programming tasks.

NHibernate is free and open-source software that is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

)[1] Tom Barrett started NHibernate, and later picked up by Mike Doerfler and Peter Smulovics.

At the end of 2005, JBoss, Inc. (now part of Red Hat) hired Sergey Koshcheyev, the then lead developer of NHibernate, to work full-time on its future versions.

NHibernate 1.2.1, released in November 2007, introduced many more features from Hibernate 3 and support for .NET 2.0, stored procedures, generics, and nullable types.

It identifies inefficient SQL data queries to eliminate unnecessary work by the database to boost overall performance of the application.

The NHibernate Profiler also alerts users to data queries that cost too much in time and directs them to the exact line in the C# code.