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Asked: 2026-05-10T22:33:01+00:00

Lets say I have two tables – child and parent with many-to-one relation. What

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Lets say I have two tables – ‘child’ and ‘parent’ with many-to-one relation. What I need is to delete child entries if parent record is deleted.

It is not a problem if I link child table from parent by creating one-to-many association in parent.hbm and set cascade=’all-delete-orphan’.

The problem is I don’t want one-to-many relation on the parent side, so I created many-to-one on the child side. The reason for that is child table is pretty big and I don’t want to extract hundreds of records every time I use parent. So my configuration looks like this:

child.hbm:

<many-to-one name='parent' class='com.example.Parent' column='parentid'/>

while parent.hbm has no associations with child.

The question is: How to make Hibernate delete records from child table when deleting a parent if a child is linked to a parent with many-to-one?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Couple of options:

    • add the one-to-many to the parent with cascading delete, but mitigate the performance loss using lazy loading.

    • use a Hibernate Interceptor (or an aspect in an AOP environment) to detect parent record deletions and delete children.

    Personally I would favour the first option, as it lets your data model more closely reflect the real relationships in your data.

    Edit: there’s a third option, but it’s not pleasant – use a database trigger, and flush your Hibernate cache (or use a non-caching session).

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