Rules on using ORM (Hibernate)

[ctapobep]

Use saveOrUpdate() instead of merge()

saveOrUpdate() is marked as deprecated, hopefully eventually it won't be removed, here's the discussion: hibernate/hibernate-orm#4590.

save()/saveOrUpdate() are actually much more optimal methods because they don't need an additional SELECT each time we want to update a detached entity.

If they get removed, not sure if Hibernate would make any sense at all since even simple operations like UPDATE will be non-optimal. Hibernate is most useful for the simple use cases. But if it becomes useless even for simple things..