I'm trying to nail down some discrepancies in behaviour using Hibernate with MyISAM and InnoDB tables in MySQL. MyISAM tables do not provide support for foreign key constraints, unlike InnoDB, so what I'm wondering is if I specify something like 'cascade=all-delete-orphan' in my mapping file, and the underlying database tables do not supprt ON DELETE CASCADE (as in the case of MyISAM), will Hibernate handle the cascading for me?

Yes, hibernate does the cascading itself.

OK, that's good. It must be my error, then, as cascades are not happening for me with MyISAM tables (no error is being returned, it's just not doing any cascading). I'm pretty certain my mapping files are correct, but I'd like to be absolutely certain. If I have a Parent class containing a collection of objects of the Child class and I want the deletion of a Parent to cause the automatic deletion of related Child objects, do I specify 'cascade=delete' in the mapping for the Parent only, or does it need to be specified in the Child mapping as well?

Did you see 16. Example: Parent/Child of the reference manual?

HTH
Ernst

Yes I did. I haven't yet found a clear explanation of what the implications are of declaring the cascade at the 'many' end (i.e., the Child mapping) as well as (or instead of?) the 'one' end of the relationship. Neither have I seen any examples that demonstrate this effectively. That's why I was looking for a simple yes/no answer.