 <p>Yes, of course you can.</p> <p>You'll need to get the MySQL JDBC driver from <a href="http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/" rel="nofollow">this</a> location.</p> <p>Grails? When you're new to programming? Whose idea was this? </p> <p>Personally, I think that taking on all these unknowns is risky for someone who's "new to programming." Do you know anything about SQL or JDBC? Have you ever written a web project before? This could be difficult.</p> <p>I don't know how to be more specific. Download the JDBC JAR from the link I gave you.</p> <p>I'd recommend that you start with a <a href="http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/jdbc/index.html" rel="nofollow">JDBC</a> tutorial first. Hibernate is not for you - yet.</p> <p>Hibernate is an object-relational mapping tool (ORM). It's a technology that lets you associate information in relational database tables to objects in your middle tier. So if you have a PERSON table with columns id, first, and last Hibernate will let you associate those data with the private data members in your Person Java class.</p> <p>That sounds easy, but it gets complicated quickly. Your relational and object models might have one-to-many and many-to-many relationships; Hibernate can help with those. Lazy loading, caching, etc. can be managed by Hibernate. </p> <p>But it comes at a cost. And it can be difficult if you aren't familiar with it.</p> <p>If you have a deadline, I'd recommend creating a Java POJO interface for your persistence classes and doing the first implementation using JDBC. If you want to swap it out for Hibernate later on you can do it without affecting clients, but you'll have a chance of making progress without Hibernate that way.</p>