We demonstrated many annotations and why and how they are used. The previous chapter covered mapping concepts; we continued that discussion in this chapter by looking at annotations that help us create better object/relational mapping. We also looked at annotations that impact the behavior of an entity. Finally, we looked at annotations that modify the SQL statement that is composed by Hibernate.

As mentioned earlier, we will use mostly annotations in this book, whenever possible. In the next chapter, we will explore various ways of fetching the data from the database and discuss different strategies.