Hibernate Union alternatives

You could use id in (select id from ...) or id in (select id from ...)

e.g. instead of non-working

from Person p where p.name="Joe"
union
from Person p join p.children c where c.name="Joe"

you could do

from Person p 
  where p.id in (select p1.id from Person p1 where p1.name="Joe") 
    or p.id in (select p2.id from Person p2 join p2.children c where c.name="Joe");

At least using MySQL, you will run into performance problems with it later, though. It’s sometimes easier to do a poor man’s join on two queries instead:

// use set for uniqueness
Set<Person> people = new HashSet<Person>((List<Person>) query1.list());
people.addAll((List<Person>) query2.list());
return new ArrayList<Person>(people);

It’s often better to do two simple queries than one complex one.

EDIT:

to give an example, here is the EXPLAIN output of the resulting MySQL query from the subselect solution:

mysql> explain 
  select p.* from PERSON p 
    where p.id in (select p1.id from PERSON p1 where p1.name = "Joe") 
      or p.id in (select p2.id from PERSON p2 
        join CHILDREN c on p2.id = c.parent where c.name="Joe") \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: PRIMARY
        table: a
         type: ALL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
      key_len: NULL
          ref: NULL
         rows: 247554
        Extra: Using where
*************************** 2. row ***************************
           id: 3
  select_type: DEPENDENT SUBQUERY
        table: NULL
         type: NULL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
      key_len: NULL
          ref: NULL
         rows: NULL
        Extra: Impossible WHERE noticed after reading const tables
*************************** 3. row ***************************
           id: 2
  select_type: DEPENDENT SUBQUERY
        table: a1
         type: unique_subquery
possible_keys: PRIMARY,name,sortname
          key: PRIMARY
      key_len: 4
          ref: func
         rows: 1
        Extra: Using where
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Most importantly, 1. row doesn’t use any index and considers 200k+ rows. Bad! Execution of this query took 0.7s wheres both subqueries are in the milliseconds.