Can any one tell me, whether we can update specific colums(fields) in a table w/o retrieving entire record ?

Only solution I know is to create a class which contains only the columns you want to update.

The easiest and safest way to do it, is to create a SmallClass and a HugeClass which extends SmallClass and create two completely different mappings for them.

This is a little awkward, but the support of explicit polymorphism in Hibernate is currently very limited and sometimes doesn't seem to work at all. (There are no subclasses without a discriminator value, so you have to use some dummy flag hack, and even if you set ploymorphism="explicit" hibernate somtimes loads the subclass if you want to retrieve the base class)

Thomson, assue that I have column c1-c10 in my table.
I am updating only c1-4 and want it to be updated......

Not sure going by your method what value will remaining column, c5-c10 will contain...

I hope you got the point..

Thanks

Sudhir

why don't you use HQL update statement?

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... tch-direct

Hibernate will not touch any columns which are not mapped in your class.

Therefore, if you retreive SmallClass, modify and update it, only the columns mapped in SmallClass will be changed. But don't use SmallClass to insert rows into the DB.