21.5. Conclusion

The sections we have just covered can be a bit confusing. However, in practice, it all works out nicely. Most Hibernate applications use the parent/child pattern in many places.

We mentioned an alternative in the first paragraph. None of the above issues exist in the case of <composite-element> mappings, which have exactly the semantics of a parent/child relationship. Unfortunately, there are two big limitations with composite element classes: composite elements cannot own collections and they should not be the child of any entity other than the unique parent.