Gavin,
Below is Section 13.4 of the doc...
Quote:
Occasionally, deleting collection elements one by one can be extremely inefficient. Hibernate isn't completly stupid, so it knows not to do that in the case of an newly-empty collection (if you called list.clear(), for example). In this case, Hibernate will issue a single DELETE and we are done!
That statement (with the title of "One Shot Delete") led me to conclusion that this was the way to perform an efficient delete of large collections. My apologies.
So a couple of follow-up questions:
1. What is the best way to perform a delete of a very large (both in numbers and in size of the things) collection, without "initializing" it. At the point in time that I want to delete this, I want to delete all things and I really don't care (in fact I don't want the burden of bringing them into scope) about the collection being initialized.
2. Does deletion work for a joined-subclass contain entity? I am getting a constraint violation every time I delete the collection holding an entity that has joined subclass