I have the following query
sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().createQuery("from Employee).list();

Currently, the query takes a long time since it eagar fetched many associations (which is needed since data needs to be passed to another system). This time delay is alright for most of the cases but there are situations where I need to know if there are any records present and not get the whole data.... Something like a count.

Can I use the sessionFactory.getCurrentSession() to just get the count.

Yes: select count(e) from Employee e. The result is returned as a Long object.

See http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3. ... ggregation for more examples.

Thanks, I amn't in front of my machine now. Will check this out soon.

Are you sure that it won't eagar fetch the associations.