Often there is the need to sort an entity or a collection, e.g. If you have a list of line items in a bill and do not want that the order may change or is semantically wrong. Unfortunately, using a java.util.List will not suffice, since the DB has not to retain the order of the list. You might recognize this only after a long time, since some RDBMS will return the rows by insertion order. There are different ways to introduce an ordering with JPA (see Java Persistence: Ordering).
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Tag: hibernate
JPQL joins and benefit/drawbacks of fetch joins
JPQL can handle LEFT OUTER JOIN (may be abbreviated to LEFT JOIN) and INNER JOIN (may be abbreviated to JOIN or to IN() <- don't use AS for the alias of "right hand side" here in combination with hibernate). The following document describes the different types of joins: visual explanation of sql joins.
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Fetch strategy subselect for hibernate
The standard fetch strategy for collections in hibernate is lazy select fetching (hibernate performance). So if you retrieve some entities (for example via a query or a collection association) with a lazy collection association, subsequent calls to this lazy association will be retrieved one by one in further requests, for example. This is called the N+1-query problem, since there is one query for retrieving the entities itself and N additional queries for the lazy association. You can reduce the overhead by setting the hibernate.default_batch_fetch_size for your persistence unit in the persistence.xml. This reduces the problem to an N/batch_size +1-query problem. You can tell hibernate to use only 1+1-queries, if you set the fetch strategy to subselect fetching. This way, all entities in the association collections of the entities are retrieved in one query as soon as one of the associations is accessed. This will be helpfull only, if you do not pick one of the objects and retrieve the association, but iterate through your results and access the association of each of them. It is even contra productive otherwise. Read More