In Relation To

Hibernate uses Proxy objects for lazy associations. If you want to understand how Porxy objects work and how you can unproxy them to the actual entities they represent, then you should definitely read this article.

Romain Manni-Bucau wrote a very interesting article which points out how you should be merging incoming and existing association collections when using Hibernate.

Getting access to the underlying database metadata is very easy with Hibernate 5. You just have to know how to make use of the Integrator SPI mechanism, as explained in this article.

Knowing how to implement equals and hashCode is of paramount importance when using JPA and Hibernate. Read this article by Steven Schwenke to find out business keys are very suitable for this task.

Javin Paul wrote an article about transient/persistent and detached entity states. For more details about this topic, you should also read this article about JPA and Hibernate entity state transitions.

Bean Validation is a very convenient mechanism for validating entity state. Check out this article to find out how you can make sure that an integer value is within a bounded range.