When using JOIN
against an entity associations, JPA will generate a JOIN between the parent entity and the child entity tables in the generated SQL statement.
So, taking your example, when executing this JPQL query:
FROM Employee emp
JOIN emp.department dep
Hibernate is going to generate the following SQL statement:
SELECT emp.*
FROM employee emp
JOIN department dep ON emp.department_id = dep.id
Note that the SQL
SELECT
clause contains only theemployee
table columns, and not thedepartment
ones. To fetch thedepartment
table columns, we need to useJOIN FETCH
instead ofJOIN
.
So, compared to JOIN
, the JOIN FETCH
allows you to project the joining table columns in the SELECT
clause of the generated SQL statement.
So, in your example, when executing this JPQL query:
FROM Employee emp
JOIN FETCH emp.department dep
Hibernate is going to generate the following SQL statement:
SELECT emp.*, dept.*
FROM employee emp
JOIN department dep ON emp.department_id = dep.id
Note that, this time, the
department
table columns are selected as well, not just the ones associated with the entity listed in theFROM
JPQL clause.
Also, JOIN FETCH
is a great way to address the LazyInitializationException
when using Hibernate as you can initialize entity associations using the FetchType.LAZY
fetching strategy along with the main entity you are fetching.