Hibernate in Practice
Rob Harrop
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Introductions
• Rob Harrop
• VP, Interface21
• Core developer on Spring
• Frequent presenter (JUGs, JavaOne, JavaPolis,
OSCON...)
• Consultant with Fortune 500 clients (mainly banking)
and government
• Author of best-selling Pro Spring
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Agenda
• What you need to know to be effective
– Mapping object graphs
– Session management
– Fetching strategies
• Hibernate favourites
– Criteria API
– Testing
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
What you need to know to be effective
• Getting started with Hibernate is easy
• Unfortunately, so is getting it wrong!
• Mastering some central concepts makes success
much more likely
– Domain mapping
– Session handling
– Fetching
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Mapping object graphs
• Aims
– Loose coupling
– High cohesion
– Accurate mapping of the domain
• Avoid
– Total navigability
– Relationships to simplify queries
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Comparing Mapping Styles
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Comparing Mapping Styles
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Mapping object graphs
• Encapsulate structural logic
– Support code evolution
– Provide a cleaner API
• Avoid mapping every relationship
– Reduce coupling
– Ease maintenance
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Session Management
• Session handling can make or break an application
• Too fine-grained and you lose any performance
benefits and real transparent persistence
• Too coarse-grained and you risk memory usage
problems and slow flushes.
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Session per Operation
• Do not do this!
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Options
• Session per transaction
– Session lifecycle is synchronized with transaction boundary
– Do not use transaction per operation :)
• Long running session
– Sessions live across multiple transactions
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Issues with Long Running Sessions
• Memory usage
– Keep Sessions around in memory
• Unexpected flushes
• Manual management patterns
– Filter/ThreadLocal
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Session per transaction
• Sessions live for the duration of a transaction
• DAOs share the same session and transaction
• Sessions and transactions are managed
transparently
– Do not pass them around in method signatures
• This gives a clean unit of work within which
persistence logic can be handled
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Session per transaction
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Open Session in View
• Steer clear wherever possible
• Unclear transactional boundaries
• Potential for incorrect data
• Real potential for poor performance
– n+1 selects
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Fetch Joins
• Fetch joins allows eager loading to be selected on a
per association, per query basis
– No need to make everything eager
– No need to use OSiV
• Typically associations are lazy by default and then
eagerly fetched as needed
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Nuances with Fetch Joins
• Unexpected number of results
• The exact number of queries may surprise you
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Criteria API
• Programmatic construction of queries
• Support for all common operators
– =, <>, >, <, IN, EXISTS, BETWEEN, LIKE
• Full support for projections
• Support for custom SQL
– Projection and selection
• Additional features
– Paging, sorting, grouping
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Criteria API
• Simple query
Criteria c = [Link]([Link]);
[Link]([Link]("name", value));
return [Link]();
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Criteria API
• Query and projection
Criteria c = [Link]([Link]);
[Link](eq("name", value));
[Link](distinct(property("name")));
Static imports from Projections
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Criteria API
• Using SQL
Criteria c = [Link]([Link]);
[Link](sqlRestriction("{alias}.name = ?", value,
[Link]));
return [Link]();
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
When to use the Criteria API
• Ad-hoc querying
• Saved queries
• Conditional queries
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distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Testing
• Testing tools:
– DBUnit
– Spring Mock
• Testing strategy
– Test with Hibernate
– Verify with JDBC
– Work against known sets of data
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
Useful Resources
• [Link]
• Java Persistence with Hibernate (King, Bauer)
• DBUnit - [Link]
Copyright 2004-2006, Interface21 Ltd. Copying, publishing, or
distributing without expressed written permission is prohibited.
