Book Image

Mastering Hibernate

Book Image

Mastering Hibernate

Overview of this book

Hibernate has been so successful since its inception that it even influenced the Java Enterprise Edition specification in that the Java Persistence API was dramatically changed to do it the Hibernate way. Hibernate is the tool that solves the complex problem of Object Relational Mapping. It can be used in both Java Enterprise applications as well as .Net applications. Additionally, it can be used for both SQL and NoSQL data stores. Some developers learn the basics of Hibernate and hit the ground quickly. But when demands go beyond the basics, they take a reactive approach instead of learning the fundamentals and core concepts. However, the secret to success for any good developer is knowing and understanding the tools at your disposal. It’s time to learn about your tool to use it better This book first explores the internals of Hibernate by discussing what occurs inside a Hibernate session and how Entities are managed. Then, we cover core topics such as mapping, querying, caching, and we demonstrate how to use a wide range of very useful annotations. Additionally, you will learn how to create event listeners or interceptors utilizing the improved architecture in the latest version of Hibernate.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Transaction management


You will certainly have worked with transactions. They ensure that a unit of work is atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable. Hibernate either uses JDBC to manage transactions or participates in a global transaction, JTA.

Local transactions

We discussed session scope in Chapter 1, Entity and Session. As we saw, one of the options for setting the session context was a local thread. This means that the scope of the session is within the thread that is executing the code, and Hibernate will start the Transaction using the API provided by JDBC. For further information on transaction management using JDBC, refer to the JavaDoc for java.sql.Connection.

In the old days before Hibernate, we had to use the JDBC API to create drivers, connections, statements, and other objects to read and write from the database. Hibernate does all this work for us and more, and it still allows us to access the low-level JDBC features. For example, the implementation of transaction savepoints...