I had a question about utilizing cascade delete in hibernate. I currently use the cascade delete functionality in hibernate. hibernate does not utilize the rdbms functionality to implement this feature. May I still specify my rdbms tables to use the cascade on delete functionality without screwing up hibernate or must I turn it off in my rdbms. Thanks in advance.

Hi,
From performance perspective it is better to use RDBMS cascade delete behavior. In case you use RDBMS functionality then there is no need to specify it in hibernate mapping. But you need to be carefull here because if the now deleted rows of related tables are already loaded by hibernate then they have became obsolete or removed now. Also you need to expiciltly evict tha cache if u r using one. In case you want to do it with hibernate then u have to bear it that hibernate is not using database functionality here as there are certain OR impedence problems. You may consider using bulk update feature but it also face same problems in caching or in case they are already loaded.