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Hibernate 8.0.0.CR1

Posted by    |       Hibernate ORM Releases

Hibernate ORM 8.0.0.CR1 is the first release candidate for Hibernate ORM 8.0!

This release brings support for Jakarta Persistence 4.0 and Jakarta Data 1.1, a new approach to flush coordination, and significant improvements to fetching, association handling, and multi-tenancy.

Jakarta Persistence 4.0 and Jakarta Data 1.1

Hibernate ORM 8.0 implements Jakarta Persistence 4.0, bringing several long-standing Hibernate capabilities into the standard API and introducing some useful new ones.

Highlights include:

  • EntityAgent, which standardizes stateless persistence operations familiar to users of Hibernate’s StatelessSession.

  • Separate APIs for queries that return results and statements that modify data.

  • Programmatic SQL result set mappings.

  • More control over fetching through entity graphs.

  • Type-safe options for session creation, persistence operations, and query execution.

  • Package- and module-level entity listeners, along with persistence unit lifecycle callbacks.

Hibernate Data Repositories implements Jakarta Data 1.1, including integration with Jakarta Persistence static queries, projections, restrictions, stateful repositories, and asynchronous repositories backed by Jakarta Concurrency or Hibernate Reactive.

Graph-based flushing

One of the largest changes in 8.0 is the introduction of graph-based flush coordination.

The new coordinator builds a dependency graph for pending entity and collection mutations, using the relational constraints of your mappings to plan their execution. This replaces an approach based primarily on operation ordering heuristics.

The goal is to handle complex persistence operations more naturally, reduce ordering failures, and provide a stronger foundation for batching and future optimizations.

Graph-based flushing is enabled by default. During this transition, the legacy coordinator remains available using:

hibernate.flush.queue.type=legacy

We would especially appreciate testing with applications that combine inserts, updates, deletes, and collection changes in the same flush.

Fetching and association handling

Subselect fetching now supports to-one associations as well as collections. Together with the new Jakarta Persistence fetch options, this gives applications more control over how entity graphs are loaded.

Hibernate can also optionally synchronize bidirectional associations during flush preparation:

hibernate.bidirectionality_management=true

When enabled, Hibernate treats the owning side as authoritative and updates inverse-side references and initialized collections. It does not initialize unloaded inverse collections solely to perform this synchronization.

For applications using filters or SQL restrictions, @Filter and @SQLRestriction may now be declared directly on @ManyToOne and @OneToOne associations. SQL restriction support also covers more mappings involving secondary tables and joined inheritance.

Multi-tenancy improvements

Discriminator-based multi-tenancy now integrates with database row-level security on PostgreSQL, Db2, SQL Server, and CockroachDB.

Hibernate also strengthens tenant handling for mutation operations, and custom @SQLUpdate and @SQLDelete statements may now include a parameter for the current tenant identifier.

And more…​

Other significant additions include:

  • JSON and XML query functions graduating from incubation and becoming available by default.

  • Improvements to stored procedure result handling.

  • Improvements for formula-based associations.

  • Formula-based map keys through @MapKeyFormula.

  • Module-level mapping annotations and package- or module-level default list semantics.

  • CDI-managed interceptors.

  • A new StatementObserver contract for observing JDBC statements.

  • A smaller hibernate-bom that manages Hibernate module versions without constraining third-party dependencies.

For integration providers, the new @SPI annotation makes supported extension contracts and their intended roles explicit. The central SQL AST and translator SPIs are also out of incubation.

Try it out

Use version 8.0.0.CR1 of the org.hibernate.orm artifacts. For requirements and compatibility information, see the Hibernate ORM 8.0 release page.

Please report problems through the Hibernate issue tracker and share feedback on the Hibernate forum.

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