Can I add 'ON DELETE CASCADE' to tables managed by Hibernate?

Question

I have some tables managed by Hibernate with various foreign key constraints. Cascade on delete is currently managed by Hibernate alone. For playing around with test data I often create and remove some rows by hand. It would help me a lot if I could add ON DELETE CASCADE to the foreign key constraints but I don't know if Hibernate trips over this because the database removes stuff before Hibernate does.

---

A lot of people seem to concentrate on DDL. My intention is not to instruct Hibernate to create DDL with SQL DELETE CASCADES. I just want to know if it does any harm if I specify an ON DELETE CASCADE in the database in addition to having JPA's cascade = CascadeType.REMOVE on the reference annotation, e.g., @ManyToOne.

Answer 1

You can use CascadeType.DELETE, however this annotation only applies to the objects in the EntityManager, not the database. You want to be sure that ON DELETE CASCADE is added to the database constraint. To verify, you can configure JPA to generate a ddl file. Take a look at the ddl file, you'll notice that ON DELETE CASCADE is not part of the constraint. Add ON DELETE CASCADE to actual SQL in the ddl file, then update your database schema from the ddl. This will fix your problem .

This link shows how to use ON DELETE CASCADE on for CONSTRAINT in MySQL. You do this on the constraint. You can also do it in a CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE statement. It's likely that JPA creates the constraint in an ALTER TABLE statement. Simply add ON DELETE CASCADE to that statement.

Note that some JPA implementors do provide a means for this functionality.

Hibernate does supply this functionality using the @OnDelete annotation, thus it is preferred to use this or simply update the ddl file if you would like to stick with standard JPA functionality.

Answer 2

I see two potential issues:

1. If an entity that represents the table to which you cascade operations directly in the database is versioned, then it would not work because when Hibernate tries to delete records on its own, the version check would fail (Hibernate would assume concurrent thread already updated or deleted the corresponding records).
2. If there are use cases in which your business logic re-persists such entity instances after removal has been cascaded to them from the parent (for example, you are deleting old parent and migrating associated children to a new one, although for better clarity I would not cascade removal at all if such a use case exists for an association, but it's up to you as it is allowed by the JPA spec), then Hibernate would just un-schedule the deletion of children and delete only the parent, so you would still end up with deleted children if you cascade deletion in the database.

Probably there are some other situations that could be problematic in some scenarios, so I would recommend not to do it.