An entity class in hibernate can refer to other entity classes or embed value types. An entity is a type on its own and has an existence of its own like a Course and its students. A value type is a type which doesn't have existence of its own, but belongs to an entity like a user and his address. Value types are always completely owned by their containing entity. Once you delete the entity, its associated value types are also deleted. But when you delete an entity, referenced entities still exist: when you delete a Course entity, you don't delete all its students.

When mapping two entities, we annotate both classes as @Entity and the mapping type is specified as @OneToOne, @OneToMany, @ManyToOne or @ManyToMany over the declaration of one entity class in the other entity class. In Many-To-Many mapping, we refer to a collection/list of the entity from another entity and vice versa; and used @ManyToOne annotation on declarations of both entity collections.

When mapping two entities, we annotate both classes as @Entity and the mapping type is specified as @OneToOne, @OneToMany, @ManyToOne or @ManyToMany over the declaration of one entity class in the other entity class. In One-To-Many mapping, we refer to a collection/list of the entity from another entity and mark the reference variable as @OneToMany. The opposite of this relation from the second entity to the first will be Many-To-One and is annotated as @ManyToOne. The example will make things more clear.

When mapping two entities, we annotate both classes as @Entity and the mapping type is specified as @OneToOne, @OneToMany, @ManyToOne or @ManyToMany over the declaration of one entity class in the other entity class. In One-To-One mapping, we refer to one entity from another and mark the reference variable as @OneToOne.

Consider a user class with an embedded list of addresses, or a company class with a list of employee details. By default, when you load the embedding class (user or company) using session.get, the embedded collection (addresses or employee details) is not actually retrieved from database, but only the top level fields are retrieved. The collection list is retrieved when you call the getter for that embedded collection. This is called lazy initialization fetch in hibernate. The alternative is called eager initialization fetch.