19.2.2. Lists, Maps, idbags and Sets

From the discussion above, it should be clear that indexed collections and sets allow the most efficient operation in terms of adding, removing and updating elements.

There is, arguably, one more advantage that indexed collections have over sets for many-to-many associations or collections of values. Because of the structure of a Set, Hibernate does not UPDATE a row when an element is "changed". Changes to a Set always work via INSERT and DELETE of individual rows. Once again, this consideration does not apply to one-to-many associations.

After observing that arrays cannot be lazy, you can conclude that lists, maps and idbags are the most performant (non-inverse) collection types, with sets not far behind. You can expect sets to be the most common kind of collection in Hibernate applications. This is because the "set" semantics are most natural in the relational model.

However, in well-designed Hibernate domain models, most collections are in fact one-to-many associations with inverse="true". For these associations, the update is handled by the many-to-one end of the association, and so considerations of collection update performance simply do not apply.