Let us say that I have a database that contains personell information. The table consists of the following columns:

A number that uniquely identifies the employee
A string containing their first name, not necessarily unique
A string containing their last name, not necessarily unique
Other miscellaneous information

Let us further say that I know for a fact that nobody in the company has the exact same name, nor will they. Is it possible to load an object from this table while only giving Hibernate the first and last name? Or do I have to do a SQL call to explicitly discover the id number, then load the object using that?

you can load the objects by lastname/firstname without a problem.

You have three options:
- write a sql statement
- use HQL (looks like SQL but actually isn't)
- Construct the query using Java Objects (this has a fancy name too, but I don't know it)

I can't give you an example, but maybe this section (14.9) from the docu helps:
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/refer ... ryhql.html

And at the end of 1.2.6 you can see how to use HQL to get a list of objects
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/refer ... ersistence

I personally love the java way to construct the query.

You can get an idea of it here:
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/refer ... teria.html

regards
Jens

Excellent! I was trying like mad to avoid having to put in explicit queries since I'm trying to keep things as general as possible, and the Java Objects method is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Thanks.