If you’ve ever run a seemingly simple JPA query only to discover dozens of unexpected SQL statements firing off, you might’ve just encountered the infamous N + 1 problem. It’s a performance issue that creeps into your app subtly—but once…

When you’re working with JPA and Hibernate, the EntityManager is your primary interface for interacting with entities and the database. But to really grasp what’s going on, you need to understand the backbone: the Persistence Context. 🧠 What Is the…

One of the most powerful but sometimes underappreciated settings in Spring Boot for JPA/Hibernate is the spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto (or spring.jpa.generate-ddl) configuration. This single line can define how your database schema is managed — whether it’s created, updated, validated, or left alone.…

🚦 The Core Decision: persist or merge? Internally, when you call repository.save(entity), Spring Data JPA decides between two JPA operations: The decision hinges on a single method: This method determines whether the entity should be treated as new or not.…