Top 10 Hibernate Interview Questions and Answers

IT Interviews can be difficult – especially Hibernate interviews where technical questions seem to be the order of the day.

These interviews are designed to test your knowledge and gauge your familiarity on the subject. And god forbid you go underprepared – chances are you will be left scratching your head, with an uncomfortable silence enveloping the room.

Rest assured, with these set of Hibernate interview questions, you can be confident knowing that you’re well prepared the next time you are about to go into an interview related to Hibernate framework.

In addition, ensure that you do some groundwork and research about the company before going in. Your effort will shine through during the job interview and you’ll be perceived as hardworking, sincere, and proactive.

Read on carefully and you can emerge from your interview looking calm, professional, and with a sense of accomplishment.

10 Essential Hibernate Interview Questions and Answers

1. How to complete a transaction in Hibernate?

There are two distinct actions if you’re looking to complete a transaction in hibernate:
• Commit
• Rollback

Once a transaction is committed, the transaction data is written to the database. In case there is a rollback, the data exchange is flushed and never written or updated to the database.

2. Can you touch upon the different types of relationships available in Hibernate mapping?

Hibernate consists of three different types of relationships:
• One-to-One mapping
• One-to-Many mapping
• Many-to-Many mapping

3. What is the purpose of Session.beginTransaction()?

Hibernate keeps a log of every data exchange with the help of a transaction. Thereon, in case a new exchange of date is about to get initiated, the function Session.beginTransaction is executed in order to begin the transaction.

4. Where is object/relational mappings defined in Hibernate?

An XML document is where object/relational mappings are usually defined in. This mapping file gives instructions to Hibernate on how to accurately map the defined class/classes to the database tables. In addition, the format .hbm.xml. should be used to save the file with the mapping document.

5. What is lazy loading?

Lazy loading is defined as a technique in which objects are loaded on an on-demand basis. It has been enabled by default since the advent of Hibernate 3 to ensure that child objects are not loaded when the parent is.

6. What are the ways to express joins in HQL?

HQL allows you to express joins in four ways:
• An implicit association join
• A fetch join in the FROM clause
• A theta-style join in the WHERE clause
• An ordinary join in the FROM clause

7. How would you define automatic dirty checking?

Automatic dirty checking can be defined as a feature that helps us in saving the effort of explicitly asking Hibernate to update the database every time we modify or make changes to the state of an object inside a transaction.

8. Explain the different ways Hibernate manages concurrency?

Hibernate has numerous ways of managing concurrency. They are as listed below:
• Automatic versioning
• Detached object
• Extended user sessions

9. Can you detail out the various collection types in Hibernate?

There are five distinct collection types that are used in hibernate for one-to-many relationship mappings.
• Bag
• Set
• List
• Array
• Map

10. Explain the difference between hibernate and Spring?

While Hibernate is an ORM framework tool used for data persistency, Spring, on the other hand, is a framework for enterprise applications. Moreover, Spring supports Hibernate and provides the different classes which are essentially templates containing the common code.

In addition to the above-mentioned list of questions, here are a few more Frequently Asked Questions which we have put together to help you crack your all-important Hibernate interviews.

• How many concurrent Hibernate sessions can exist at any point in time in an application?
• Is SessionFactory a thread-safe object?
• Can you explain the role Session interface plays in Hibernate?
• Describe the process of switching between relational databases without code changes.
• Explain the difference between the session.get() method and the session.load() method.
• Is it possible to use Hibernate to map persistent entity POJO to XML files?
• List out all the different states of an instance in Hibernate.
• Can you describe the different contextual sessions in Hibernate?
• Touch upon the pros of Hibernate Criteria API.
• Explain the benefit of Hibernate Tools Eclipse plugin.
• Describe component mapping in Hibernate.

So, there you have it, our list of tried and tested Hibernate interview questions carefully put together with the intent of making you interview ready. Remember, even if you get stuck during the interview, make sure to stay calm and remain positive.

At the end of the day, it’s not always about getting the right answer, it’s more about showcasing how confident you are and how you cope under pressure.

Moreover, you can certainly do your chances of clearing the interview with flying colors no harm by keeping this list of tricky Hibernate interview questions and answers handy.

Your new career awaits.

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