Is there a way in Hibernate to delete a row in the database without
having to load the object's data into memory ?

net.sf.hibernate.Session does not offer any method that deletes
rows by primary key.

I've noticed in the logs that even the method
delete( String query )
first loads objects into memory, and then deletes them.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think that a method that
lets me delete an object without having to load it into memory
should be very useful and performance-wise in some cases.

Santiago

What about constraints related to objects you delete (cascade all etc) ?

You're right, I haven't thought about that.

Maybe the framework could detect if cascades apply to that object,
and perform the loading only in those cases.

its also Lifecycle callback, collections, etc....