Hibernate many-to-many cascading delete

Question

I have 3 tables in my database: Students, Courses and Students_Courses

Students can have multiple courses and courses can have

Answer 1

Based on what you've told me you don't want cascade=CascadeType.ALL on the getCourseses method in Student. Keep in mind that Hibernate cascades are not the same as database cascades. Even if you don't have any cascades then Hibernate will delete the Students_Courses record.

The best way to think of Hibernate cascades is that if you call an operation on an entity and that operation is listed in the cascade list then that operation will be called on all of the child entities.

For example, when you call delete on Student, since delete is in the cascade list for Courses, Hibernate will call delete on each of the Course entities referenced by that student. That is why you are seeing the Course records disappearing.

Don't worry about database cascades, Hibernate will take care of those on its own.