Spring versus Hibernate Validator

I looked at both Hibernate and Spring Validation briefly today.

Hibernate is annotation-based and works something like this: (1) You annotate with the proper validation rule (e.g., @NotNull) on the fields of your bean; (2) You call Hibernate's ClassValidator to validate, which returns the validation errors. Presumably, it inspects the annotations on the bean fields and performs the appropriate validation.

Pros: Easy declaration based validation.
Cons: I haven't figure out a way to perform database check for uniqueness.

Spring's validation is programatically-based. You implement the Validator interface which contains two methods, one of which is the validate method. You perform your validation manually, either writing the rules yourself or using Spring's utility methods, e.g., ValidationUtils.rejectIfEmpty(...)

Pros: Very flexible which allows for database record-based validation
Cons: More complex than Hibernate's Validator.

Neither solution is particularly ideal. Hibernate seems too simplistic while Spring's requires too much programming. I lean towards Spring's Validator mainly because it's very apparent as to how one would perform database record validation.

Reference:
Tutorial: Getting Started with Hibernate Validator
[Chapter] 6.2 Validation using Spring's Validator interface