We are looking into the impact of outer-join on the quantity and quality of the SQL generated by Hibernate. Outer-join configuration worked, as documented, for loading of individual objects and queries built by Hibernate Criteria interface. Outer-join configuration does not make a difference for the top-level object and its direct references, when HQL query is executed, unless one explicitly mentions joins in the HQL query.

For example, For an object Deal with two <many-to-one> associations and a single collection, Hibernate does not create join when retrieving the Deal Object. However, joins are created on all down stream objects. The code is really a single line code.

session.createQuery("from DealImpl as deal where deal.objectId = 501").list();

Is that expected behavior? If not, any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks and regards

Zafar

A HQL query will not respect or use the default fetching strategies you defined in your mappings. You will have to use the "fetch" HQL keyword of you want eager fetching at runtime. Note that this is by design and a good thing. Also note that a Criteria query does respect the mapping fetching strategies (but you can override them).