I'm a new user to Hibernate 3.05 and ORM tools in general.

Hibernate/ORM seems great for the common scenarios where you need to INSERT/UPDATE individual db records or query record data.

However, it seems better to stick with straight SQL for
- Queries that aren't table related. SELECT COUNT(*) ...
- UPDATE statements on large data sets.
- Very DBMS specific tasks such as bulk load operations, backup/admin tasks, etc...

Is that the general consensus?

I like the way you can name hibernate queries and keep them in configuration files separate from the code. Is there a common technique to do the same with native SQL commands? I can just write my own simple XML config system, but is there a more standard solution?

Hibernate rocks for many many things but at times I feel it is better just to write some SQL and do it yourself, particularly for the things you outlined. As for a general consensus, I dunno. It's hard to get developers to agree that they all are carbon based, let alone agree on something like that.

use <sql-query> to get named native sql queries.

Your observation about DBMS specific tasks are correct.

UPDATE statements on large data sets is possible in H3, but
wether it is what you want or not depends on your needs.

Queries thar arent table related - I guess you here are talking about scalar/report queries ? Here I would disagree since that is one of the powers of Hibernate - it has very good support for it!

/max

Hibernate 3.0.5 supports bulk update and delete operations. However, it doesn't seem bulk insert is supported.

However, here is a work-around for bulk insert in Hibernate 3.0.5:

http://beanlib.sourceforge.net/Hibernat ... readme.txt
http://beanlib.sourceforge.net/Hibernat ... ert/3.0.5/

any reason why you haven't submitted that stuff as an patch ?

Honestly that's because it's a hack, not a proper solution for the long term. The up side is the hack works! And it took me less than a day effort to make it happen. The down side is it introduces the use of a special "null" column alias notation (just to keep Hibernate happy) plus the side effect of native SQL query to make it work.

The proper solution is to support bulk insert operation directly in HQL. This involes changing the antlr grammer, etc., and will take longer to implement, and it's probably make more sense to leave it to someone who is more familiar with the existing Hibernate code base.

many of the patches we receive are not 100% so a hack is better than nothing ;)

we do have insert in hql and we do want the bulk update/delete to also be allowed via sql-query.

as you have already used a day to tweak hibernate then I suggest you submit it and maybe we can use parts of it - that saves us time!
...but of course if it is too much of a hack we wont apply it - but thats life anyhow ;)

ok, here you go the patch:

http://opensource2.atlassian.com/projec ... se/HHH-915