High-Performance Hibernate Tutorial
I’ve been using Hibernate for almost a decade and I admit it was not an easy journey. This tutorial is actually a summary of my book, whose main goal is to provide guidelines and practical advice for optimizing the data access layer performance while maintaining a strong consistency transactional model.
This material is useful for both beginners and experienced developers, going beyond the reference documentation.
Tips and best practices
- 14 High-Perforamance Java Persistence tips
- How does a relational database work
- How to detect the Hibernate N+1 query problem during testing
- A beginner’s guide to SQL injection and how you should prevent it
- Why you should always check the SQL statements generated by Criteria API
- How to store date, time, and timestamps in UTC time zone with JDBC and Hibernate
- The fastest way to update a table row when using Hibernate and Oracle
- JPA providers market share
Bootstrapping
- How to bootstrap Hibernate without the
persistence.xmlconfiguration file - How to get access to database table metadata with Hibernate 5
- How to get the entity mapping to database table binding metadata from Hibernate
Mappings
Basic types
- A beginner’s guide to Hibernate Types
- A beginner’s guide to JPA and Hibernate Cascade Types
- Hot to map calculated properties with JPA and Hibernate
@Formulaannotation - How to map calculated properties with Hibernate
@Generatedannotation - How to map JSON objects using generic Hibernate Types
- How to store schema-less EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) data using JSON and Hibernate
- How to map Java and SQL arrays with JPA and Hibernate
- How to implement a custom basic type using Hibernate UserType
- What’s new in JPA 2.2 – Java 8 Date and Time Types
- The best way to map a Java 1.8 Optional entity attribute with JPA and Hibernate
- The best way to map an Enum Type with JPA and Hibernate
Equals and hashCode
- The best way to implement equals, hashCode, and toString with JPA and Hibernate
- How to implement equals and hashCode using the entity identifier (primary key)
- How to implement equals and hashCode using the entity natural identifier
Relationships
- The best way to map a @OneToOne relationship with JPA and Hibernate
- The best way to map a @OneToMany relationship with JPA and Hibernate
- The best way to use the @ManyToMany annotation with JPA and Hibernate
- The best way to map a many-to-many association with extra columns when using JPA and Hibernate
- The best way to map a Composite Primary Key with JPA and Hibernate
- How to map a composite identifier using an automatically @GeneratedValue with JPA and Hibernate
- How to map a @ManyToOne association using a non-Primary Key column
- How to customize an entity association JOIN ON clause with Hibernate
@JoinFormula - How to optimize unidirectional collections with JPA and Hibernate
- How do Set and List collections behave with JPA and Hibernate
Advanced mapping techniques
- Fluent API entity building with JPA and Hibernate
- How to map the latest child of a parent entity using Hibernate
@JoinFormula - How to update only a subset of entity attributes using JPA and Hibernate
- How to use external XML mappings files with JPA and Hibernate
- How to encrypt and decrypt data with Hibernate
- The best way to soft delete with Hibernate
- How to fix “wrong column type encountered” schema-validation errors with JPA and Hibernate
Identifiers
- A beginner’s guide to natural and surrogate database keys
- The hi/lo algorithm
- Hibernate and UUID identifiers
- Hibernate Identity, Sequence and Table (Sequence) generator
- A beginner’s guide to Hibernate enhanced identifier generators
- Hibernate pooled and pooled-lo identifier generators
- Why you should never use the TABLE identifier generator with JPA and Hibernate
- Why should not use the AUTO JPA GenerationType with MySQL and Hibernate
- How to replace the TABLE identifier generator with either SEQUENCE or IDENTITY in a portable way
- How to combine the Hibernate assigned generator with a sequence or an identity column
- How to implement a custom String-based sequence identifier generator with Hibernate
Inheritance
- The best way to use entity inheritance with JPA and Hibernate
- The best way to map the SINGLE_TABLE inheritance with JPA and Hibernate
- The best way to map the @DiscriminatorColumn with JPA and Hibernate
Connection management
- The simple scalability equation
- The anatomy of Connection Pooling
- Why you should use FlexyPool
- How to monitor your connection pool with FlexyPool
- How to monitor a Java EE DataSource
- Why you should always use hibernate.connection.provider_disables_autocommit for resource-local JPA transactions
- How does aggressive connection release work in Hibernate
Flushing
- A beginner’s guide to JPA/Hibernate entity state transitions
- A beginner’s guide to flush strategies in JPA and Hibernate
- How does persist and merge work in JPA
- How does AUTO flush strategy works in Hibernate
- How does JPA and Hibernate define the AUTO flush mode
- A beginner’s guide to Hibernate flush operation order
- The anatomy of Hibernate dirty checking mechanism
- How to customize Hibernate dirty checking mechanism
- How to enable bytecode enhancement dirty checking in Hibernate
- How does the bytecode enhancement dirty checking mechanism work in Hibernate 4.3
Fetching
- A beginner’s guide to Hibernate fetching strategies
- EAGER fetching is a code smell
- The best way to map a projection query to a DTO (Data Transfer Object) with JPA and Hibernate
- The best way to handle the `LazyInitializationException`
- The best way to lazy load entity attributes using JPA and Hibernate
- ResultSet statement fetching with JDBC and Hibernate
- How to fetch entities multiple levels deep with Hibernate
- The Open Session In View Anti-Pattern
- The hibernate.enable_lazy_load_no_trans Anti-Pattern
- How does MySQL result set streaming perform vs fetching the whole JDBC ResultSet at once
- How does a JPA Proxy work and how to unproxy it with Hibernate
- The best way to fix the Hibernate “HHH000104: firstResult/maxResults specified with collection fetch; applying in memory!” warning message
Concurrency control
- A beginner’s guide to ACID and database transactions
- How does MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control) work
- How do PostgreSQL advisory locks work
- A beginner’s guide to database locking and the lost update phenomena
- How to prevent lost updates in long conversations
- A beginner’s guide to read and write skew phenomena
- A beginner’s guide to the Phantom Read anomaly, and how it differs between 2PL and MVCC
- How does database pessimistic locking interact with INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE SQL statements
- Logical vs physical clock optimistic locking
- How to retry JPA transactions after an OptimisticLockException
- How does Hibernate guarantee application-level repeatable reads
- Hibernate collections optimistic locking
- How to address the OptimisticLockException in JPA and Hibernate
- How to prevent OptimisticLockException with Hibernate versionless optimistic locking
- A beginner’s guide to transaction isolation levels in enterprise Java
- A beginner’s guide to Java Persistence locking
- How does LockModeType.OPTIMISTIC work in JPA and Hibernate
- How to fix optimistic locking race conditions with pessimistic locking
- How does LockModeType.OPTIMISTIC_FORCE_INCREMENT work in JPA and Hibernate
- How does LockModeType.PESSIMISTIC_FORCE_INCREMENT work in JPA and Hibernate
- How do LockModeType.PESSIMISTIC_READ and LockModeType.PESSIMISTIC_WRITE work in JPA and Hibernate
- How does CascadeType.LOCK works in JPA and Hibernate
- How to increment the parent entity version whenever a child entity gets modified with JPA and Hibernate
Batching
- Batch processing best practices
- The best way to do batch processing with JPA and Hibernate
- How to batch INSERT and UPDATE statements with Hibernate
- How to batch DELETE statements with Hibernate
- How to customize the JDBC batch size for each Persistence Context with Hibernate
- How to find which statement failed in a JDBC Batch Update
- How to optimize the merge operation using update while batching with JPA and Hibernate
Caching
- A beginner’s guide to Cache synchronization strategies
- Things to consider before jumping to enterprise caching
- Caching best practices
- How does Hibernate store second-level cache entries
- How does Hibernate READ_ONLY CacheConcurrencyStrategy work
- How does Hibernate NONSTRICT_READ_WRITE CacheConcurrencyStrategy work
- How does Hibernate READ_WRITE CacheConcurrencyStrategy work
- How does Hibernate TRANSACTIONAL CacheConcurrencyStrategy work
- How does Hibernate Collection Cache work
- How does Hibernate Query Cache work
Queries
- How to resolve the Hibernate global database schema and catalog for native SQL queries
- The performance penalty of Class.forName when parsing JPQL and Criteria queries
- How to map table rows to columns using SQL PIVOT or CASE expressions
- The JPA EntityManager createNativeQuery is a Magic Wand
- Why you should use the Hibernate ResultTransformer to customize result set mappings
- Why you should definitely learn SQL Window Functions
- What’s new in JPA 2.2 – Stream the result of a Query execution
Stored procedures
- How to call Oracle stored procedures and functions with JPA and Hibernate
- How to call SQL Server stored procedures and functions with JPA and Hibernate
- How to call PostgreSQL functions (stored procedures) with JPA and Hibernate
- How to call MySQL stored procedures and functions with JPA and Hibernate
Audit
- A beginner’s guide to CDC (Change Data Capture)
- How to extract change data events from MySQL to Kafka using Debezium
- The best way to implement an audit log using Hibernate Envers
Testing
- The minimal configuration for testing Hibernate
- Hibernate integration testing strategies
- How to run database integration tests 20 times faster
- How to run integration tests at warp speed using Docker and tmpfs
- The best way to log JDBC statements
- The best way to detect database connection leaks
- How to install DB2 Express-C on Docker and set up the JDBC connection properties
- How to get started with CockroachDB and Hibernate
If you like these articles, I bet you are going to love my book as well.
Testimonials
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Kaspars Žarinovs (@kaspars_z) January 25, 2017
Hi Vald,
Thanks for providing these high quality tutorials around hibernate and JPA. They are very intuitive and useful. I went through most of the tutorials and couldn’t find anywhere you talked about mapping strategies(Per table, per class hierarchy etc…). Can I assume you are going to talk about those in a later tutorial or you always work with a 3rd normal form database schemas?
Thanks,
Paul
When it comes to mappings, I always prefer simplicity. While you can model very exotic relations, those are very difficult to tune and they usually perform badly. For inheritance, I like to push the composition as much as possible. That’s why I don’t go for complex inheritance hierarchies, but rather have a common base entity which can easily swap in simpler many-to-one inheritance hierarchies. This resembles the JOINED inheritance, only it allows you to change from one type to the other without the base class primary key reusing hassle.
Make sense.
Most of the time, I go for the simple composition rather than inheritance.
Cheers,
Paul
It’s just the readme on the Github account and then you run mvn clean install and Hibernate takes care of the rest.
Hi Vlad,
I have a question about using java 8 with Hibernate 3.2.2.ga version. We tried but the javassist bytecode enhancement (or rather the ByteCodeProviderImpl class of Hibernate) generates class files which do not pass the strict class checking of java 8.
When upgrading to java 7 we got away by using -XX-useSplitVerifier shutting the new verifier up. But this option is no longer available in java 8. I now tried -noverify which seems to work but is rather a big hammer and I would rather have a more elegant (and safe) solution.
We could upgrade hibernate to a more recent version, say 5.x but this would mean a lot of work and impact and I will only consider that if there really is no other option.
What would you recommend?
With kind regards,
Indra
I suggest you upgrading to Hibernate 5. On the long run, you are better off this way since we fixed a lot of issues and introduced many useful features as well.
Hi Vlad,
Thanks for sharing good tutorials on Hibernate concepts. They are really helpful.
Need your help in understanding more on how Hibernate behaves in JEE Clustered environment.
Thanks,
Pavan Kumar
Thanks. I’m glad you liked them. You’re in luck. My book, High-Performance Java Persistence gives more details so it will help you get some tips about clustered environments, master-slave replication, the role of 2nd level cache, so, enjoy reading it!
Hello Vald,
Much obliged for giving these amazing instructional exercises around rest and JPA. They are extremely natural and helpful. I experienced the greater part of the instructional exercises and couldn’t discover anyplace you discussed mapping strategies(Per table, per class order and so on… ). Can I accept you will discuss those in a later instructional exercise or you generally work with a third typical shape database outlines?
Much obliged,
I don’t think I will cover those in this tutorial. However, you can read more about them in my book, High-Performance Java Persistence.
Hello Vlad, I’m wondering if you can help me. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45490536/hibernate-many-to-many-cascade-save-with-join-table
thanks a lot.