Jakarta Persistence 4.0 (Under development)

Release for Jakarta EE 12

Jakarta Persistence defines a standard for management of persistence
and object/relational mapping in Java(R) environments.

New features, enhancements or additions

• Add new API for working with detached entities, along with associated lifecycle callbacks
• Add programmatic API for expressing native query result set mappings
• New annotations for expressing named entity graphs
• Allow entities to be loaded in read-only mode
• Allow batch loading of entities by id
• Add operation to obtain the number of query results
• Add an annotation to exclude a field from optimistic locking
• Allow @NamedQuery and @NamedNativeQuery more control over query execution
• Allow passing an EntityGraph to refresh(), and improve usability of entity graphs
• Make select new implicit when a query result type is given
• Add a @PreMerge lifecycle callback
• Add support for SequencedCollection and friends
• Decouple entity discovery/enhancement from EntityManagerFactory initialization in container environments
• Specify that the jakarta.persistence.database-xxxx configuration properties are available for use by the application program, and not only by containers

Removals, deprecations or backwards incompatible changes

• Drop APIs already marked forRemoval in 3.2
• Change return type of createNativeQuery() to TypedQuery
• Drop use of SecurityManager
• Clarify the format of entity names

Architectural changes

• Donate definition of Jakarta Persistence Query Language to Jakarta Query
• Take ownership of standalone TCK

Minimum Java SE Version

Java SE 21 or higher

Details

• Jakarta Persistence 4.0 Release Record
  • Jakarta EE Platform 12 Release Plan

Ballots

Plan Review

The Specification Committee Ballot concluded successfully on 2025-04-23 with the following results.

Non-binding Votes

The ballot was run on the jakarta.ee-spec mailing list