Searches and Queries

Abstract

In the last chapter, we discussed how the Hibernate session is used to interact with the database. Some of the session’s methods take query strings in their parameter lists or return Query objects. These methods are used to request arbitrary information from the database. In order to fully show how they’re used, we must introduce you to the Hibernate Query Language (HQL) used to phrase these requests. As well as extracting information (with SELECT), HQL can be used to alter the information in the database (with INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE). We cover all of this basic functionality in this chapter. Hibernate’s query facilities do not allow you to alter the database structure.