Hibernate - does it change the structure of a database?

[By ZeNGiN]

I'm building bigger project in java on Spring and lot of people have adviced me, to use hibernate to ease access to the database. The problem is,that I have to use database from previous version of this project, which used to be written in PHP, so they didn't use hibernate for sure. I've read something about hibernate, but I'm still not sure in one thing - does it have to change the structure of the database or can I use standard MySQL database with stored values in int, varchar and other types and use hibernate just to get rid of lot of SQL in my java code?