JPQL is a powerful query language that allows you to define database queries based on your entity model. Its structure and syntax are very similar to SQL. But there is an important difference that I want to point out before I walk you through the different parts of a JPQL query.

JPQL uses the entity object model instead of database tables to define a query. That makes it very comfortable for us Java developers, but you have to keep in mind that the database still uses SQL. Hibernate, or any other JPA implementation, has to transform the JPQL query into SQL. It is, therefore, a good practice to activate the logging of the SQL statements during development to check the generated SQL statements.



Entity Model

Before we dive into the details of JPQL, let’s have a quick look at the entity model I use for all examples.

It consists of an Author who has written one or more Publications. A Publication can be a Book or a BlogPost. A Book might have been published by one Publisher.

Selection – The FROM clause

The FROM clause defines from which entities the data gets selected. Hibernate, or any other JPA implementation, maps the entities to the according database tables.

The syntax of a JPQL FROM clause is similar to SQL but uses the entity model instead of table or column names. The following code snippet shows a simple JPQL query in which I select all Author entities.

SELECT a FROM Author a

As you can see, I reference the Author entity instead of the author table and assign the identification variable a to it. The identification variable is often called alias and is similar to a variable in your Java code. It is used in all other parts of the query to reference this entity.

Joining multiple entities

Inner Joins

If you want to select data from more than one entity, e.g., all authors and the books they’ve written, you have to join the entities in the FROM clause. The easiest way to do that is to use the defined associations of an entity like in the following code snippet.

SELECT a, b FROM Author a JOIN a.books b

The definition of the Author entity provides all information Hibernate needs to join it to the Book entity, and you don’t have to provide an additional ON statement. In this example, Hibernate uses the primary keys of the Author and Book entity to join them via the association table of the many-to-many association.

JOINs of unrelated entities are not supported by the JPA specification, but you can use a theta join which creates a cartesian product and restricts it in the WHERE clause to the records with matching foreign and primary keys. I use this approach in the following example to join the Book with the Publisher entities.

SELECT b, p FROM Book b, Publisher p WHERE b.fk_publisher = p.id

You can read more about this workaround and Hibernates proprietary support for JOINs of unrelated entities in How to join unrelated entities with JPA and Hibernate.

Left Outer Joins

INNER JOINs, like the one in the previous example, require that the selected entities fulfill the join condition. The query returned only the Author entities with associated Book entities but not the ones for which the database doesn’t contain a Book entity. If you want to include the authors without published books, you have to use a LEFT JOIN, like in the following code snippet.

SELECT a, b FROM Author a LEFT JOIN a.books b

Additional Join Conditions

The previous examples use the defined association to join the entities. But sometimes you only want to join the related entities which fulfill additional conditions. Since JPA 2.1, you can do this for INNER JOINs, and LEFT JOINs with an additional ON statement.

SELECT a, p FROM Author a JOIN a.publications p ON p.publishingDate > ?1

Path expressions or implicit joins

Path expressions create implicit joins and are one of the benefits provided by the entity model. You can use the ‘.’ operator to navigate to related entities as I do in the following code snippet.

SELECT b FROM Book b WHERE b.publisher.name LIKE ‘%es%

As you can see, I use the ‘.’ operator to navigate via the publisher attribute of the Book entity b to the related Publisher entities. That creates an implicit join between the Book and Publisher entity which will be translated into an additional join statement in the SQL query.

Polymorphism and Downcasting

Polymorphism

When you choose an inheritance strategy that supports polymorphic queries, your query selects all instances of the specified class and its subclasses. With the model in the example for this blog post, you can, for example, select all Publication entities, which are either Book or BlogPost entities.

SELECT p FROM Publication p

Or you can select a specific subtype of a Publication, like a BlogPost.

SELECT b FROM BlogPost b

Downcasting

Since JPA 2.1, you can also use the TREAT operator for downcasting in FROM and WHERE clauses. I use that in the following code snippet to select all Author entities with their related Book entities. As you can see in the model, the publications association defines an association between the Author and the Publication entity. So without the TREAT operator, the query would return all Author entities with their associated Book or BlogPost entities.

SELECT a, p FROM Author a JOIN treat (a.publications AS Book) p

ATTENTION: There are several issues with the implementation of TREAT in Hibernate 5.1. Based on my experiments, Hibernate 5.1 handles TREAT only, if it is written in lower case and used in the WHERE clause. The treat operator in this example is ignored by Hibernate 5.1.0.Final.

Restriction – The WHERE clause

The next important part of a JPQL query is the WHERE clause which you can use to restrict the selected entities to the ones you need for your use case. The syntax is very similar to SQL, but JPQL supports only a small subset of the SQL features. If you need more sophisticated features for your query, you can use a native SQL query.

JPQL supports a set of basic operators to define comparison expressions. Most of them are identical to the comparison operators supported by SQL, and you can combine them with the logical operators AND, OR and NOT into more complex expressions.

Operators for single-valued expressions:

Equal: author.id = 10

Not equal: author.id <> 10

Greater than: author.id > 10

Greater or equal then: author.id => 10

Smaller than: author.id < 10

Smaller or equal then: author.id <= 10

Between: author.id BETWEEN 5 and 10

Like: author.firstName LIKE ‘%and%’

The % character represents any character sequence. This example restricts the query result to all Authors with a firstName that contains the String ‘and’, like Alex and er or S and ra. You can use an _ instead of % as a single character wildcard. You can also negate the operator with NOT to exclude all Authors with a matching firstName.

The % character represents any character sequence. This example restricts the query result to all Authors with a firstName that contains the String ‘and’, like Alex er or S ra. You can use an _ instead of % as a single character wildcard. You can also negate the operator with NOT to exclude all Authors with a matching firstName. Is null: author.firstName IS NULL

You can negate the operator with NOT to restrict the query result to all Authors who’s firstName IS NOT NULL.

You can negate the operator with NOT to restrict the query result to all Authors who’s firstName IS NOT NULL. In: author.firstName IN (‘John’, ‘Jane’)

Restricts the query result to all Authors with the first name John or Jane.

Operators for collection expressions:

Is empty: author.books IS EMPTY

Restricts the query result to all Authors that don’t have any associated Book entities. You can negate the operator (IS NOT EMPTY) to restrict the query result to all Authors with associated Book entities.

Restricts the query result to all Authors that don’t have any associated Book entities. You can negate the operator (IS NOT EMPTY) to restrict the query result to all Authors with associated Book entities. Size: size(author.books) > 2

Restricts the query result to all Authors who are associated with more than 2 Book entities.

Restricts the query result to all Authors who are associated with more than 2 Book entities. Member of: :myBook member of author.books

Restricts the query result to all Authors who are associated with a specific Book entity.

You can use one or more of the operators to restrict your query result. The following query returns all Author entities with a firstName attribute that contains the String “and” and an id attribute greater or equal 20 and who have written at least 5 books.

SELECT a FROM Author a WHERE a.firstName like ‘%and%’ and a.id >= 20 and size(author.books) >= 5

Projection – The SELECT clause

The projection of your query defines which information you want to retrieve from the database. This part of the query is very different from SQL. In SQL, you specify a set of database columns and functions as your projection. You can do the same in JPQL by selecting a set of entity attributes or functions as scalar values, but you can also define entities or constructor calls as your projection. Hibernate, or any other JPA implementation, maps this information to a set of database columns and function calls to define the projection of the generated SQL statement.

Let’s have a look at the different options. You can use any combination of them in your queries.

Entities

Entities are the most common projection in JPQL queries. Hibernate uses the mapping information of the selected entities to determine the database columns it has to retrieve from the database. It then maps each row of the result set to the selected entities.

SELECT a FROM Author a

It’s comfortable to use entities as your projection. But you should always keep in mind that all entities are managed by the persistence context which creates overhead for read-only use cases. In these situations, it’s better to use scalar values or a constructor reference as a projection.

Scalar values

Scalar value projections are very similar to the projections you know from SQL. Instead of database columns, you select one or more entity attributes or the return value of a function call with your query.

SELECT a.firstName, a.lastName FROM Author a

Constructor references

Constructor references are a good projection for read-only use cases. They’re more comfortable to use than scalar value projections and avoid the overhead of managed entities.

JPQL allows you to define a constructor call in the SELECT clause. You can see an example of it in the following code snippet. You just need to provide the fully qualified class name and specify the constructor parameters of an existing constructor. Similar to the entity projection, Hibernate generates an SQL query which returns the required database columns and uses the constructor reference to instantiate a new object for each record in the result set.

SELECT new org.thoughts.on.java.model.AuthorValue(a.id, a.firstName, a.lastName) FROM Author a

Distinct query results

You probably know SQL’s DISTINCT operator which removes duplicates from a projection. JPQL supports this operator as well.

SELECT DISTINCT a.lastName FROM Author a

Functions

Functions are another powerful feature of JPQL that you probably know from SQL. It allows you to perform basic operations in the WHERE and SELECT clause. You can use the following functions in your query:

upper(String s): transforms String s to upper case

lower(String s): transforms String s to lower case

current_date(): returns the current date of the database

current_time(): returns the current time of the database

current_timestamp(): returns a timestamp of the current date and time of the database

substring(String s, int offset, int length): returns a substring of the given String s

trim(String s): removes leading and trailing whitespaces from the given String s

length(String s): returns the length of the given String s

locate(String search, String s, int offset): returns the position of the String search in s. The search starts at the position offset

abs(Numeric n): returns the absolute value of the given number

sqrt(Numeric n): returns the square root of the given number

mod(Numeric dividend, Numeric divisor): returns the remainder of a division

treat(x as Type): downcasts x to the given Type

size(c): returns the size of a given Collection c

index(orderedCollection): returns the index of the given value in an ordered Collection

Grouping – The GROUP BY and HAVING clause

When you use aggregate functions, like count(), in your SELECT clause, you need to reference all entity attributes that are not part of the function in the GROUP BY clause.

The following code snippet shows an example that uses the aggregate function count() to count how often each last name occurs in the Author table.

SELECT a.lastName, COUNT(a) FROM Author a GROUP BY a.lastName

The HAVING clause is similar to the WHERE clause and allows you to define additional restrictions for your query. The main difference is that the restrictions specified in a HAVING clause are applied to a group and not to a row.

I use it in the following example to select all last names that start with a ‘B’ and count how often each of them occurs in the Author table.

SELECT a.lastName, COUNT(a) AS cnt FROM Author a GROUP BY a.lastName HAVING a.lastName LIKE ‘B%’

Ordering – The ORDER BY clause

You can define the order in which the database shall return your query results with an ORDER BY clause. Its definition in JPQL is similar to SQL. You can provide one or more entity attributes to the ORDER BY clause and specify an ascending (ASC) or a descending (DESC) order.

The following query selects all Author entities from the database in the ascending order of their lastName attributes. All Authors with the same lastName are returned in descending order of their firstName.

SELECT a FROM Author a ORDER BY a.lastName ASC, a.firstName DESC

Subselects

A subselect is a query embedded into another query. It’s a powerful feature you probably know from SQL. Unfortunately, JPQL supports it only in the WHERE clause and not in the SELECT or FROM clause.

Subqueries can return one or multiple records and can use the aliases defined in the outer query. The following example shows a query that uses a subquery to count all Books written by an Author and returns only the Authors who’ve written more than 1 Book.

SELECT a FROM Author a WHERE (SELECT count(b) FROM Book b WHERE a MEMBER OF b.authors ) > 1

Summary

As you’ve seen, the syntax and structure of JPQL are pretty similar to SQL. This makes JPQL easy to learn when you’re already familiar with SQL. But you have to keep in mind that SQL supports a lot of advanced features that you can’t use with JPQL. If you need one or more of them for a specific use case, you should use a native SQL query.