in the spring reference docs, it says with regards to data access exceptions:
appropriate conversion of specific API exceptions to an unchecked infrastructure exception hierarchy.
can someone explain how i should utilize this in my daos? i am using hibernate and not using the hibernatetemplate() as suggested by the springsource team. do i have to use the @repository annotation to get this functionality?

also what is the benefit of it being unchecked? that i dont have to catch any dataaccess failure myself and that spring will do it for me? how is this beneficial? shouldnt i catch the exception if the database cant be reached so i can notify the user of an outage?