As I'm new to Hibernate, I wanted to ask the following:
* If I have a simple query which updates a single column:
"update person set firstName='Joe' where id=1"
How do update only the first name without having to fetch the entire
object from the database (assuming I have the primary key) and
only by setting one object field?
* If I want to write my own SQL query/statement (hints, exotic syntax),
can I do so while still using Hibernate to execute it and populate the
POJOs?

Please see
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... rysql.html
and
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... tch-direct