Hi all,

I have one issue in dealing with Hibernate associations. I just wanted to know that is there any drawback of using Associations by Hibernate mapping file? One of my senior is saying that there will be a lot of performance problems in using associations by Hibernate.

Other approach is to use Seperate mapping class that corresponds to the table for the mapping. And map this class as our persistent class in the mapping file, argument is that we will not need to jump into the hotch potch of Lazy loading and sets and lists. Is this the right approach to deal with relationships between classes?

I just want to know your openions. It would be better if you can explain it with logical arguments and examples.

Well, in my opinion it is even better to use associations in hibernate. If I understand you right, the other solution would be to manage all foreign keys manually, e.g. having an attribute foreign_id as long instead of an object-type attribute.

The good thing about using associations is, that you hibernate is able to manage all things about foreign keys and loading. Of course, you have to do the right config and usage to get performance gains, but if you use it right, it's going to be way faster than without it. For example with a simple HQL "from MyParent join fetch childs" you could retrieve all parents and their childs in a single statement. Doing it manually you would probably select parents first and then the childs of every single parent (n+1 select problem).

Consult the manual, there are several other examples of how to improve performance.