The best way to initialize LAZY entity and collection proxies with JPA and Hibernate

Introduction In this article, we are going to see the best way to initialize LAZY proxies and collections when using JPA and Hibernate. I decided to write this article because there are way too many resources available on the Internet that mislead the reader into using awkward and inefficient practices.

How do find and getReference EntityManager methods work when using JPA and Hibernate

Introduction While doing my High-Performance Java Persistence training, I realized that not all developers are familiar with the getReference method of the JPA EntityManager and most of them use find almost exclusively. In this article, we are going to see the difference between the find and getReference method so that it’s clear when to apply them depending on the underlying use case.

How does a JPA Proxy work and how to unproxy it with Hibernate

Introduction In this article, I’m going to explain how JPA and Hibernate Proxy objects work, and how you can unproxy an entity Proxy to get access to the underlying POJO instance. The JPA lazy loading mechanism can either be implemented using Proxies or Bytecode Enhancement so that calls to lazy associations can be intercepted and relationships initialized prior to returning the result back to the caller. Initially, in JPA 1.0, it was assumed that Proxies should not be a mandatory requirement, and that’s why @ManyToOne and @OneToOne associations use an EAGER loading… Read More

How does FlexyPool support both Connection proxies and decorators

Proxies FlexyPool monitors connection pool usage and so it needs to intercept the connection close method call. For simplicity sake, the first version was relying on dynamic proxies for this purpose: As straightforward as it may be, a proxy invocation is slower than a decorator, which calls the target method using a direct invocation. Because all connection pools use proxies anyway, adding another proxy layer only adds more call-time overhead and so now FlexyPool supports connection decorators as well.