You can use either Hibernate 4.3 or Hibernate 5.0 with Spring Boot 1.3. As you've observed, Hibernate 4.3.x is the default version.
To use Hibernate 5.0 you should override the hibernate.version
property in Spring Boot's dependency management. Assuming that you're using Maven:
<properties>
<hibernate.version>5.0.5.Final</hibernate.version>
</properties>
When using Hibernate 5.0, the one big difference from using Hibernate 4.3.x is that you'll lose Spring Boot's custom naming strategy. Due to a breaking change made in Hibernate 5.0, you'll see a warning like this logged at startup:
2015-12-07 10:04:56.911 WARN 81371 --- [ main] org.hibernate.orm.deprecation : HHH90000006: Attempted to specify unsupported NamingStrategy via setting [hibernate.ejb.naming_strategy]; NamingStrategy has been removed in favor of the split ImplicitNamingStrategy and PhysicalNamingStrategy; use [hibernate.implicit_naming_strategy] or [hibernate.physical_naming_strategy], respectively, instead.
If you dislike Hibernate 5's defaults, you can specify a custom implicit or physical naming strategy in Spring Boot's application.properties
using the spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.implicit_naming_strategy
and spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.physical_naming_strategy
properties respectively.
org.hibernate.cfg.ImprovedNamingStrategy
? Or maybe its a better decision to hold back on Hibernate 5 at the moment until Spring boot officially migrates? – Onfroi