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What are the pros and cons of using Criteria or HQL? The Criteria API is a nice object-oriented way to express queries in Hibernate, but sometimes Criteria Queries are more difficult to understand/build than HQL.
When do you use Criteria and when HQL? What do you prefer in which use cases? Or is it just a matter of taste?
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HQL is suitable for executing Static Queries, where as Criteria is suitable for executing Dynamic Queries. HQL is to perform both select and non-select operations on the data, Criteria is only for selecting the data, we cannot perform non-select operations using criteria.
The Hibernate Query Language (HQL) and Java Persistence Query Language (JPQL) are both object model focused query languages similar in nature to SQL. JPQL is a heavily-inspired-by subset of HQL. A JPQL query is always a valid HQL query, the reverse is not true however.
JPQL syntax is very similar to the syntax of SQL. Having SQL like syntax is an advantage because SQL is a simple structured query language and many developers are using it in applications. SQL works directly against relational database tables, records and fields, whereas JPQL works with Java classes and instances.
In Hibernate, the Criteria API helps us build criteria query objects dynamically. Criteria is a another technique of data retrieval apart from HQL and native SQL queries. The primary advantage of the Criteria API is that it is intuitively designed to manipulate data without using any hard-coded SQL statements.
I mostly prefer Criteria Queries for dynamic queries. For example it is much easier to add some ordering dynamically or leave some parts (e.g. restrictions) out depending on some parameter.
On the other hand I'm using HQL for static and complex queries, because it's much easier to understand/read HQL. Also, HQL is a bit more powerful, I think, e.g. for different join types.
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