Using Hibernate, I have bi-directional association between person/address. Person entity can have too many addresses and I want to add and remove to address collection without loading entire collection.

Below is a example depicting my case, in my real case, number of address entities are huge that i want to avoid loading all of them when doing add/remove.

Java class:

public class Person
{
   private UUID id;
    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "person", fetch = FetchType.LAZY, cascade= {CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.MERGE})
    private Set<Address> addresses = new HashSet<>();

    public Person addAddress(Address address) {
        addresses.add(address);
        address.setPerson(this);
        return this;
    }

    public Person removeAddress(Address address) {
        // though i want to remove one specific address entity association,
        // it loads all addresses which is a lot impacting perf
        addresses.remove(address);
        address.setPerson(null);
        return this;
    }
}

public class Address {

    @ManyToOne(cascade={CascadeType.PERSIST}, fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
    @NotNull
    private Person person;

    public void setPerson(Person person) {
        this.person = person; ...
    }

}

When i want to dissassociate a address from Person entity, i call person.removeAddress(address) which loads all the addresses of this person. In my case there are 100s of them and i want to avoid loading all of them into memory.

Once my modifications are done on entity, i call personRepository.flush() and don’t do any manual HQL query.

Are there any solutions to avoid loading all addresses of this person, when i only want to remove one given address association?