In Relation To

At flush-time, Hibernate needs to know what entity state has become dirty (changed) so that it knows what data needs to be written to the database and what data does not. Historically Hibernate only defined one means of such dirtiness checking, but has since added multiple additional schemes which seem to be not as well known. The intent for this blog is to start a base for improving the documentation around dirty checking and these various options.

The Hibernate team is pleased to announce today's release of Hibernate 4.3.0.Beta1 which targets the (still not finalized) JPA 2.1 specification which is part of the upcoming Java EE 7 platform. This is the first release targeting JPA 2.1 support. As mentioned, JPA 2.1 is not completely finalized so this support should be considered a preview. JPA 2.1 defines a number of enhancements. I won't go in depth in each of them here as I plan to follow up with separate in-depth blog posts for some of these features. However, the web abounds with good summaries of the new features; for example:

The soon-to-be final JPA 2.1 specification adds standardized support for dealing with JDBC CallableStatements (stored procedure and function calls). Arun Gupta has a decent summary of the initial JPA 2.1 features, including Stored procedure support, at https://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/entry/jpa_2_1_early_draft. Standardized here means both across providers as well as across database vendors. Pretty sweet. As much as I liked the idea of standarized support for handling callable statements, I was not overly thrilled with certain aspects of the proposed JPA StoredProcedureQuery API. My worries were mainly around how the outputs were accessed, especially when multiple results are expected. Let's first look at a simple example of a procedure returning a result:

Hibernate ORM version 4.1.7 has just been released. This is a bug fix release containing 27 fixes. See the changelog for the complete list of fixes. Again, 4.1.7 benefited from a lot of community involvement. We really appreciate all the help in terms of pull requests, testing, comments, ideas, etc.

Hibernate ORM version 4.1.2 has just been released. This is a minor bug fix release containing 35 bug fixes. See the changelog for the complete list of fixes. Specific fixes of note include:

Hibernate ORM 4.1.1 has just been released. This release contains a slew of improvements and bug fixes. Some specific changes of interest include:

Hibernate ORM 4.1.0 has just been released. This release adds a few new features, as well as a bunch of improvements and bug fixes. Some features in particular include:

One of the new features in 4.1 will be the addition of an actual API for loading entities by natural id. Yes previous versions had the ability to do natural id loading leveraging criteria queries, but that approach was very limiting. The new API will allow caching at both the Session and SessionFactory level in addition to providing a consistent API. The new approach has been made available for identifier based loading as well, again for consistency.

The GitHub repo formerly named hibernate-core will be getting renamed after the 4.0.1 release today. Its new name will be hibernate-orm. The whys have been discussed over the past few weeks in the developer meetings, so I will not go into all that; see the meeting minutes if you are interested. I did, however, want to discuss the ramifications of this rename.

Hibernate Core 4.0.1 has just been released. It mainly contains bug fixes and minor improvements. Check out the release notes for details.