2.9. Natural Ids

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Natural ids represent domain model unique identifiers that have a meaning in the real world too.
Even if a natural id does not make a good primary key (surrogate keys being usually preferred), it&#8217;s still useful to tell Hibernate about it.
As we will see later, Hibernate provides a dedicated, efficient API for loading an entity by its natural id much like it offers for loading by its identifier (PK).

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