Although both the Hibernate Session and the JPA EntityManager define a flush() method to manually trigger this process, it’s much more convenient to let Hibernate manage the Persistence Context flushing. Unfortunately, there’s is a major difference between how JPA and Hibernate define the automatic flushing mechanism.
When using the default AUTO flush mode, the Persistence Context should be flushed as follows:
This is only required for the native Hibernate API when using a Session explicitly.
Since Hibernate 5.2, if you bootstrap Hibernate using JPA (e.g. persistence.xml), then even the Hibernate FlushType.AUTO will behave just like its JPA counterpart.
Only if you bootstrap Hibernate using the native mechanism, will the Hibernate Session use the legacy FlushType.AUTO behavior.
JPA AUTO flushing
JPA is more strict, and the AUTO flush mode must trigger a flush before any query. More the section 3.10.8 of the Java Persistence API specification says that the AUTO flush mode should ensure that all pending changes are visible by any executing query.
This can be demonstrated by executing the following method:
assertTrue(((Number) entityManager
.createNativeQuery("select count(*) from Post")
.getSingleResult()).intValue() == 0);
Post post = new Post("Hibernate");
post.setId(1L);
entityManager.persist(post);
assertTrue(((Number) entityManager
.createNativeQuery("select count(*) from Post")
.getSingleResult()).intValue() == 1);
When running this test, Hibernate generates the following SQL statements:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Post
INSERT INTO post (title, version, id)
VALUES ('Hibernate', 0, 1)
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Post
So, the flush was triggered and the INSERT statement was executed prior to running the SELECTstatement.
This doesn’t happens when using a Session:
assertTrue(((Number) entityManager
.createQuery("select count(*) from Post")
.getSingleResult()).intValue() == 0);
Post post = new Post("Hibernate");
post.setId(1L);
entityManager.persist(post);
Session session = entityManager.unwrap(Session.class);
assertTrue(((Number) session
.createSQLQuery("select count(*) from Post")
.uniqueResult()).intValue() == 0);
This time, Hibernate generates the following statements:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Post
SELECT COUNT(*) as col_0_0_
FROM post blogentity0_
INSERT INTO post (title, version, id)
VALUES ('Hibernate', 0, 1)
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Flushing is a very important concept for any ORM too, and Hibernate is no different.
As a rule of thumb, it’s better to make sure that native SQL queries don’t return inconsistent results when using the Hibernate Session API.