JPA and Hibernate - Criteria vs JPQL or HQL

Question

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

User · Answer

Most the answers here are misleading and mention that Criteria Queries are slower than HQL, which is actually not the case.

If you delve deep and perform some tests you will see Criteria Queries perform much better that regular HQL.

And also with Criteria Query you get Object Oriented control which is not there with HQL.

For more information read this answer here.

User · Answer

Criteria query for dynamically we can construct query based on our inputs  In case of Hql query is the static query once we construct we can t change the structure of the query

User · Answer

I also prefer Criteria Queries for dynamic queries  But I prefer hql for delete queries  for example if delete all records from child table for parent id  xyz   It is easily achieved by HQL  but for criteria API first we must fire n number of delete query where n is number of child table records

User · Answer

Criteria are the only way to specify natural key lookups that take advantage of the special optimization in the second level query cache   HQL does not have any way to specify the necessary hint     You can find some more info here    http   tech puredanger com 2009 07 10 hibernate-query-cache

User · Answer

This post is quite old   Most answers talk about Hibernate criteria  not JPA criteria  JPA 2 1 added CriteriaDelete CriteriaUpdate  and EntityGraph that controls what exactly to fetch  Criteria API is better since Java is OO  That is why JPA is created  When JPQL is compiled  it will be translated to AST tree OO model  before translated to SQL

User · Answer

Criteria API Criteria API is better suited for dynamically generated queries  So  if you want to add WHERE clause filters  JOIN clauses  or vary the ORDER BY clause or the projection columns  then the Criteria API can help you generate the query dynamically in a way that also prevents SQL Injection attacks  On the other hand  Criteria queries are less expressive and can even lead to very complicated and inefficient SQL queries  JPQL and HQL JPQL is the JPA standard entity query language while HQL extends JPQL and adds some Hibernate-specific features  JPQL and HQL are very expressive and resemble SQL  Unlike Criteria API  JPQL and HQL make it easy to predict the underlying SQL query that s generated by the JPA provider  It s also much easier to review one s HQL queries than Criteria ones  It s worth noting that selecting entities with JPQL or Criteria API makes sense if you need to modify them  Otherwise  a DTO projection is a much better choice  Conclusion If you don t need to vary the entity query structure  then use JPQL or HQL  If you need to change the filtering or sorting criteria or change the projection  then use Criteria API  However  just because you are using JPA or Hibernate  it doesn t mean you should not use native SQL  SQL queries are very useful and JPQL and Criteria API are not a replacement for SQL

User · Answer

HQL is much easier to read  easier to debug using tools like the Eclipse Hibernate plugin  and easier to log  Criteria queries are better for building dynamic queries where a lot of the behavior is determined at runtime   If you don t know SQL  I could understand using Criteria queries  but overall I prefer HQL if I know what I want upfront

User · Answer

HQL is much easier to read  easier to debug using tools like the Eclipse Hibernate plugin  and easier to log  Criteria queries are better for building dynamic queries where a lot of the behavior is determined at runtime   If you don t know SQL  I could understand using Criteria queries  but overall I prefer HQL if I know what I want upfront

User · Answer

Most the answers here are misleading and mention that Criteria Queries are slower than HQL, which is actually not the case.

If you delve deep and perform some tests you will see Criteria Queries perform much better that regular HQL.

And also with Criteria Query you get Object Oriented control which is not there with HQL.

For more information read this answer here.

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

HQL can cause security concerns like SQL injection

User · Answer

There is another way  I ended up with creating a HQL parser based on hibernate original syntax so it first parse the HQL then it could dynamically inject dynamic parameters or automatically adding some common filters for the HQL queries  It works great

User · Answer

To use the best of both worlds  the expressivity and conciseness of HQL and the dynamic nature of Criteria consider using Querydsl   Querydsl supports JPA Hibernate  JDO  SQL and Collections   I am the maintainer of Querydsl  so this answer is biased

User · Answer

This post is quite old   Most answers talk about Hibernate criteria  not JPA criteria  JPA 2 1 added CriteriaDelete CriteriaUpdate  and EntityGraph that controls what exactly to fetch  Criteria API is better since Java is OO  That is why JPA is created  When JPQL is compiled  it will be translated to AST tree OO model  before translated to SQL

User · Answer

Criteria API Criteria API is better suited for dynamically generated queries  So  if you want to add WHERE clause filters  JOIN clauses  or vary the ORDER BY clause or the projection columns  then the Criteria API can help you generate the query dynamically in a way that also prevents SQL Injection attacks  On the other hand  Criteria queries are less expressive and can even lead to very complicated and inefficient SQL queries  JPQL and HQL JPQL is the JPA standard entity query language while HQL extends JPQL and adds some Hibernate-specific features  JPQL and HQL are very expressive and resemble SQL  Unlike Criteria API  JPQL and HQL make it easy to predict the underlying SQL query that s generated by the JPA provider  It s also much easier to review one s HQL queries than Criteria ones  It s worth noting that selecting entities with JPQL or Criteria API makes sense if you need to modify them  Otherwise  a DTO projection is a much better choice  Conclusion If you don t need to vary the entity query structure  then use JPQL or HQL  If you need to change the filtering or sorting criteria or change the projection  then use Criteria API  However  just because you are using JPA or Hibernate  it doesn t mean you should not use native SQL  SQL queries are very useful and JPQL and Criteria API are not a replacement for SQL

User · Answer

Criteria Api is one of the good concept of Hibernate  according to my view these are the few point by which we can make difference between HQL and Criteria Api   HQL is to perform both select and non-select operations on the data   but Criteria is only for selecting the data  we cannot perform non-select operations using criteria  HQL is suitable for executing Static Queries  where as Criteria is suitable for executing Dynamic Queries HQL doesn   t support pagination concept  but we can achieve pagination with Criteria  Criteria used to take more time to execute than HQL  With Criteria we are safe with SQL Injection because of its dynamic query generation but in HQL as your queries are either fixed or parametrized  there is no safe from SQL Injection

User · Answer

For me the biggest win on Criteria is the Example API  where you can pass an object and hibernate will build a query based on those object properties   Besides that  the criteria API has its quirks  I believe the hibernate team is reworking the api   like    a criteria createAlias  obj   forces a inner join instead of a possible outer join you can t create the same alias two times some sql clauses have no simple criteria counterpart  like a subselect  etc    I tend to use HQL when I want queries similar to sql  delete from Users where status  blocked    and I tend to use criteria when I don t want to use string appending   Another advantage of HQL is that you can define all your queries before hand  and even externalise them to a file or so

User · Answer

HQL is much easier to read  easier to debug using tools like the Eclipse Hibernate plugin  and easier to log  Criteria queries are better for building dynamic queries where a lot of the behavior is determined at runtime   If you don t know SQL  I could understand using Criteria queries  but overall I prefer HQL if I know what I want upfront

User · Answer

Criteria api provide one distinct feature that Neither SQL or HQL provides  ie  it allows compile time checking of a query

User · Answer

There is another way  I ended up with creating a HQL parser based on hibernate original syntax so it first parse the HQL then it could dynamically inject dynamic parameters or automatically adding some common filters for the HQL queries  It works great

User · Answer

HQL is much easier to read  easier to debug using tools like the Eclipse Hibernate plugin  and easier to log  Criteria queries are better for building dynamic queries where a lot of the behavior is determined at runtime   If you don t know SQL  I could understand using Criteria queries  but overall I prefer HQL if I know what I want upfront

User · Answer

We used mainly Criteria in our application in the beginning but after it was replaced with HQL due to the performance issues   Mainly we are using very complex queries with several joins which leads to multiple queries in Criteria but is very optimized in HQL   The case is that we use just several propeties on specific object and not complete objects  With Criteria the problem was also string concatenation   Let say if you need to display name and surname of the user in HQL it is quite easy  name           surname  but in Crteria this is not possible   To overcome this we used ResultTransormers  where there were methods where such concatenation was implemented for needed result   Today we mainly use HQL like this   String hql    select                  c uuid as uuid                  c name as name                  c objective as objective                  c startDate as startDate                  c endDate as endDate                  c description as description                  s status as status                  t type as type                  from     Campaign class getName       c                  left join c type t                  left join c status s    Query query    hibernateTemplate getSessionFactory   getCurrentSession   getSession EntityMode MAP  createQuery hql   query setResultTransformer Transformers ALIAS TO ENTITY MAP   return query list      so in our case the returned records are maps of needed properties

User · Answer

Criteria is an object-oriented API  while HQL means string concatenation  That means all of the benefits of object-orientedness apply    All else being equal  the OO version is somewhat less prone to error  Any old string could get appended into the HQL query  whereas only valid Criteria objects can make it into a Criteria tree  Effectively  the Criteria classes are more constrained  With auto-complete  the OO is more discoverable  and thus easier to use  for me at least   You don t necessarily need to remember which parts of the query go where  the IDE can help you You also don t need to remember the particulars of the syntax  like which symbols go where   All you need to know is how to call methods and create objects    Since HQL is very much like SQL  which most devs know very well already  then these  don t have to remember  arguments don t carry as much weight  If HQL was more different  then this would be more importatnt

User · Answer

For me Criteria is a quite easy to Understand and making Dynamic queries  But the flaw i say so far is that It loads all many-one etc relations because we have only three types of FetchModes i e Select  Proxy and Default and in all these cases it loads many-one  may be i am wrong if so help me out      2nd issue with Criteria is that it loads complete object i e if i want to just load EmpName of an employee it wont come up with this insted it come up with complete Employee object and i can get EmpName from it due to this it really work bad in reporting  where as HQL just load did t load association relations  what u want so increase performance many times   One feature of Criteria is that it will safe u from SQL Injection because of its dynamic query generation where as in HQL as ur queries are either fixed or parameterised so are not safe from SQL Injection   Also if you write HQL in ur aspx cs files  then you are tightly coupled with ur DAL   Overall my conclusion is that there are places where u can t live without HQL like reports so use them else Criteria is more easy to manage

User · Answer

I usually use Criteria when I don t know what the inputs will be used on which pieces of data   Like on a search form where the user can enter any of 1 to 50 items and I don t know what they will be searching for   It is very easy to just append more to the criteria as I go through checking for what the user is searching for   I think it would be a little more troublesome to put an HQL query in that circumstance   HQL is great though when I know exactly what I want

User · Answer

We used mainly Criteria in our application in the beginning but after it was replaced with HQL due to the performance issues   Mainly we are using very complex queries with several joins which leads to multiple queries in Criteria but is very optimized in HQL   The case is that we use just several propeties on specific object and not complete objects  With Criteria the problem was also string concatenation   Let say if you need to display name and surname of the user in HQL it is quite easy  name           surname  but in Crteria this is not possible   To overcome this we used ResultTransormers  where there were methods where such concatenation was implemented for needed result   Today we mainly use HQL like this   String hql    select                  c uuid as uuid                  c name as name                  c objective as objective                  c startDate as startDate                  c endDate as endDate                  c description as description                  s status as status                  t type as type                  from     Campaign class getName       c                  left join c type t                  left join c status s    Query query    hibernateTemplate getSessionFactory   getCurrentSession   getSession EntityMode MAP  createQuery hql   query setResultTransformer Transformers ALIAS TO ENTITY MAP   return query list      so in our case the returned records are maps of needed properties

User · Answer

For me the biggest win on Criteria is the Example API  where you can pass an object and hibernate will build a query based on those object properties   Besides that  the criteria API has its quirks  I believe the hibernate team is reworking the api   like    a criteria createAlias  obj   forces a inner join instead of a possible outer join you can t create the same alias two times some sql clauses have no simple criteria counterpart  like a subselect  etc    I tend to use HQL when I want queries similar to sql  delete from Users where status  blocked    and I tend to use criteria when I don t want to use string appending   Another advantage of HQL is that you can define all your queries before hand  and even externalise them to a file or so

User · Answer

To use the best of both worlds  the expressivity and conciseness of HQL and the dynamic nature of Criteria consider using Querydsl   Querydsl supports JPA Hibernate  JDO  SQL and Collections   I am the maintainer of Querydsl  so this answer is biased

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

HQL can cause security concerns like SQL injection

User · Answer

There is a difference in terms of performance between HQL and criteriaQuery  everytime you fire a query using criteriaQuery  it creates a new alias for the table name which does not reflect in the last queried cache for any DB  This leads to an overhead of compiling the generated SQL  taking more time to execute   Regarding fetching strategies  http   www hibernate org 315 html          Criteria respects the laziness settings in your mappings and guarantees that what you want loaded is loaded  This means one Criteria query might result in several SQL immediate SELECT statements to fetch the subgraph with all non-lazy mapped associations and collections  If you want to change the  how  and even the  what   use setFetchMode   to enable or disable outer join fetching for a particular collection or association  Criteria queries also completely respect the fetching strategy  join vs select vs subselect     HQL respects the laziness settings in your mappings and guarantees that what you want loaded is loaded  This means one HQL query might result in several SQL immediate SELECT statements to fetch the subgraph with all non-lazy mapped associations and collections  If you want to change the  how  and even the  what   use LEFT JOIN FETCH to enable outer-join fetching for a particular collection or nullable many-to-one or one-to-one association  or JOIN FETCH to enable inner join fetching for a non-nullable many-to-one or one-to-one association  HQL queries do not respect any fetch  join  defined in the mapping document

User · Answer

There is a difference in terms of performance between HQL and criteriaQuery  everytime you fire a query using criteriaQuery  it creates a new alias for the table name which does not reflect in the last queried cache for any DB  This leads to an overhead of compiling the generated SQL  taking more time to execute   Regarding fetching strategies  http   www hibernate org 315 html          Criteria respects the laziness settings in your mappings and guarantees that what you want loaded is loaded  This means one Criteria query might result in several SQL immediate SELECT statements to fetch the subgraph with all non-lazy mapped associations and collections  If you want to change the  how  and even the  what   use setFetchMode   to enable or disable outer join fetching for a particular collection or association  Criteria queries also completely respect the fetching strategy  join vs select vs subselect     HQL respects the laziness settings in your mappings and guarantees that what you want loaded is loaded  This means one HQL query might result in several SQL immediate SELECT statements to fetch the subgraph with all non-lazy mapped associations and collections  If you want to change the  how  and even the  what   use LEFT JOIN FETCH to enable outer-join fetching for a particular collection or nullable many-to-one or one-to-one association  or JOIN FETCH to enable inner join fetching for a non-nullable many-to-one or one-to-one association  HQL queries do not respect any fetch  join  defined in the mapping document

User · Answer

Criteria are the only way to specify natural key lookups that take advantage of the special optimization in the second level query cache   HQL does not have any way to specify the necessary hint     You can find some more info here    http   tech puredanger com 2009 07 10 hibernate-query-cache

User · Answer

I also prefer Criteria Queries for dynamic queries  But I prefer hql for delete queries  for example if delete all records from child table for parent id  xyz   It is easily achieved by HQL  but for criteria API first we must fire n number of delete query where n is number of child table records

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Criteria is an object-oriented API  while HQL means string concatenation  That means all of the benefits of object-orientedness apply    All else being equal  the OO version is somewhat less prone to error  Any old string could get appended into the HQL query  whereas only valid Criteria objects can make it into a Criteria tree  Effectively  the Criteria classes are more constrained  With auto-complete  the OO is more discoverable  and thus easier to use  for me at least   You don t necessarily need to remember which parts of the query go where  the IDE can help you You also don t need to remember the particulars of the syntax  like which symbols go where   All you need to know is how to call methods and create objects    Since HQL is very much like SQL  which most devs know very well already  then these  don t have to remember  arguments don t carry as much weight  If HQL was more different  then this would be more importatnt

User · Answer

For me Criteria is a quite easy to Understand and making Dynamic queries  But the flaw i say so far is that It loads all many-one etc relations because we have only three types of FetchModes i e Select  Proxy and Default and in all these cases it loads many-one  may be i am wrong if so help me out      2nd issue with Criteria is that it loads complete object i e if i want to just load EmpName of an employee it wont come up with this insted it come up with complete Employee object and i can get EmpName from it due to this it really work bad in reporting  where as HQL just load did t load association relations  what u want so increase performance many times   One feature of Criteria is that it will safe u from SQL Injection because of its dynamic query generation where as in HQL as ur queries are either fixed or parameterised so are not safe from SQL Injection   Also if you write HQL in ur aspx cs files  then you are tightly coupled with ur DAL   Overall my conclusion is that there are places where u can t live without HQL like reports so use them else Criteria is more easy to manage

User · Answer

Criteria Api is one of the good concept of Hibernate  according to my view these are the few point by which we can make difference between HQL and Criteria Api   HQL is to perform both select and non-select operations on the data   but Criteria is only for selecting the data  we cannot perform non-select operations using criteria  HQL is suitable for executing Static Queries  where as Criteria is suitable for executing Dynamic Queries HQL doesn   t support pagination concept  but we can achieve pagination with Criteria  Criteria used to take more time to execute than HQL  With Criteria we are safe with SQL Injection because of its dynamic query generation but in HQL as your queries are either fixed or parametrized  there is no safe from SQL Injection

User · Answer

I don t want to kick a dead horse here  but it is important to mention that Criteria queries are now deprecated  Use HQL

User · Answer

HQL is to perform both select and non-select operations on the data   but Criteria is only for selecting the data  we cannot perform non-select operations using criteria HQL is suitable for executing Static Queries  where as Criteria is suitable for executing Dynamic Queries   HQL doesn   t support pagination concept  but we can achieve pagination with Criteria Criteria used to take more time to execute then HQL With Criteria we are safe with SQL Injection because of its dynamic query generation but in HQL as your queries are either fixed or parametrized  there is no safe from SQL Injection      source

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Criteria query for dynamically we can construct query based on our inputs  In case of Hql query is the static query once we construct we can t change the structure of the query

User · Answer

For me the biggest win on Criteria is the Example API  where you can pass an object and hibernate will build a query based on those object properties   Besides that  the criteria API has its quirks  I believe the hibernate team is reworking the api   like    a criteria createAlias  obj   forces a inner join instead of a possible outer join you can t create the same alias two times some sql clauses have no simple criteria counterpart  like a subselect  etc    I tend to use HQL when I want queries similar to sql  delete from Users where status  blocked    and I tend to use criteria when I don t want to use string appending   Another advantage of HQL is that you can define all your queries before hand  and even externalise them to a file or so

User · Answer

Criteria is an object-oriented API  while HQL means string concatenation  That means all of the benefits of object-orientedness apply    All else being equal  the OO version is somewhat less prone to error  Any old string could get appended into the HQL query  whereas only valid Criteria objects can make it into a Criteria tree  Effectively  the Criteria classes are more constrained  With auto-complete  the OO is more discoverable  and thus easier to use  for me at least   You don t necessarily need to remember which parts of the query go where  the IDE can help you You also don t need to remember the particulars of the syntax  like which symbols go where   All you need to know is how to call methods and create objects    Since HQL is very much like SQL  which most devs know very well already  then these  don t have to remember  arguments don t carry as much weight  If HQL was more different  then this would be more importatnt

User · Answer

There is a difference in terms of performance between HQL and criteriaQuery  everytime you fire a query using criteriaQuery  it creates a new alias for the table name which does not reflect in the last queried cache for any DB  This leads to an overhead of compiling the generated SQL  taking more time to execute   Regarding fetching strategies  http   www hibernate org 315 html          Criteria respects the laziness settings in your mappings and guarantees that what you want loaded is loaded  This means one Criteria query might result in several SQL immediate SELECT statements to fetch the subgraph with all non-lazy mapped associations and collections  If you want to change the  how  and even the  what   use setFetchMode   to enable or disable outer join fetching for a particular collection or association  Criteria queries also completely respect the fetching strategy  join vs select vs subselect     HQL respects the laziness settings in your mappings and guarantees that what you want loaded is loaded  This means one HQL query might result in several SQL immediate SELECT statements to fetch the subgraph with all non-lazy mapped associations and collections  If you want to change the  how  and even the  what   use LEFT JOIN FETCH to enable outer-join fetching for a particular collection or nullable many-to-one or one-to-one association  or JOIN FETCH to enable inner join fetching for a non-nullable many-to-one or one-to-one association  HQL queries do not respect any fetch  join  defined in the mapping document

User · Answer

Criteria api provide one distinct feature that Neither SQL or HQL provides  ie  it allows compile time checking of a query

User · Answer

I usually use Criteria when I don t know what the inputs will be used on which pieces of data   Like on a search form where the user can enter any of 1 to 50 items and I don t know what they will be searching for   It is very easy to just append more to the criteria as I go through checking for what the user is searching for   I think it would be a little more troublesome to put an HQL query in that circumstance   HQL is great though when I know exactly what I want

User · Answer

There is a difference in terms of performance between HQL and criteriaQuery  everytime you fire a query using criteriaQuery  it creates a new alias for the table name which does not reflect in the last queried cache for any DB  This leads to an overhead of compiling the generated SQL  taking more time to execute   Regarding fetching strategies  http   www hibernate org 315 html          Criteria respects the laziness settings in your mappings and guarantees that what you want loaded is loaded  This means one Criteria query might result in several SQL immediate SELECT statements to fetch the subgraph with all non-lazy mapped associations and collections  If you want to change the  how  and even the  what   use setFetchMode   to enable or disable outer join fetching for a particular collection or association  Criteria queries also completely respect the fetching strategy  join vs select vs subselect     HQL respects the laziness settings in your mappings and guarantees that what you want loaded is loaded  This means one HQL query might result in several SQL immediate SELECT statements to fetch the subgraph with all non-lazy mapped associations and collections  If you want to change the  how  and even the  what   use LEFT JOIN FETCH to enable outer-join fetching for a particular collection or nullable many-to-one or one-to-one association  or JOIN FETCH to enable inner join fetching for a non-nullable many-to-one or one-to-one association  HQL queries do not respect any fetch  join  defined in the mapping document

User · Answer

For me the biggest win on Criteria is the Example API  where you can pass an object and hibernate will build a query based on those object properties   Besides that  the criteria API has its quirks  I believe the hibernate team is reworking the api   like    a criteria createAlias  obj   forces a inner join instead of a possible outer join you can t create the same alias two times some sql clauses have no simple criteria counterpart  like a subselect  etc    I tend to use HQL when I want queries similar to sql  delete from Users where status  blocked    and I tend to use criteria when I don t want to use string appending   Another advantage of HQL is that you can define all your queries before hand  and even externalise them to a file or so

User · Answer

Criteria is an object-oriented API  while HQL means string concatenation  That means all of the benefits of object-orientedness apply    All else being equal  the OO version is somewhat less prone to error  Any old string could get appended into the HQL query  whereas only valid Criteria objects can make it into a Criteria tree  Effectively  the Criteria classes are more constrained  With auto-complete  the OO is more discoverable  and thus easier to use  for me at least   You don t necessarily need to remember which parts of the query go where  the IDE can help you You also don t need to remember the particulars of the syntax  like which symbols go where   All you need to know is how to call methods and create objects    Since HQL is very much like SQL  which most devs know very well already  then these  don t have to remember  arguments don t carry as much weight  If HQL was more different  then this would be more importatnt

User · Answer

I usually use Criteria when I don t know what the inputs will be used on which pieces of data   Like on a search form where the user can enter any of 1 to 50 items and I don t know what they will be searching for   It is very easy to just append more to the criteria as I go through checking for what the user is searching for   I think it would be a little more troublesome to put an HQL query in that circumstance   HQL is great though when I know exactly what I want

User · Answer

I usually use Criteria when I don t know what the inputs will be used on which pieces of data   Like on a search form where the user can enter any of 1 to 50 items and I don t know what they will be searching for   It is very easy to just append more to the criteria as I go through checking for what the user is searching for   I think it would be a little more troublesome to put an HQL query in that circumstance   HQL is great though when I know exactly what I want

User · Answer

I don t want to kick a dead horse here  but it is important to mention that Criteria queries are now deprecated  Use HQL

User · Answer

HQL is to perform both select and non-select operations on the data   but Criteria is only for selecting the data  we cannot perform non-select operations using criteria HQL is suitable for executing Static Queries  where as Criteria is suitable for executing Dynamic Queries   HQL doesn   t support pagination concept  but we can achieve pagination with Criteria Criteria used to take more time to execute then HQL With Criteria we are safe with SQL Injection because of its dynamic query generation but in HQL as your queries are either fixed or parametrized  there is no safe from SQL Injection      source

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