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Why can't hibernate lazily fetch #ManyToOne and #OneToOne?

After some frustrating issues and tests, I've read that hibernate can't lazily fetch ToOne relationships.
From what I've read, hibernate lazily fetches ToMany by setting its own Set as a proxy, and when a method is called on that Set, it fetched the data in the database before performing the action. Fine.
For ToOne, the reason I've seen is that since the attribute can be null (unlike ToMany), hibernate has to know whether it needs to populate it with null or a proxy, and that hibernate cannot know that without querying the other table. And since it has to query that other table, it eagerly fetches the data at the same time.
I find that rather stupid. I can understand it on the non owning side of the relationship, where nothing in the table indicates whether the toOne is populated, but on the owning side, the table contains a column with the foreign key, which is either null or not.
Why can't hibernate query the table and set the attribute to either null or a proxy depending on the value from that column? It doesn't need to check the second table, if your column is not null, you know the second table has a corresponding entry (and if it hasn't, you have an integrity problem and hibernate should just throw).

Hibernate behaves more or les how you descibed.
On the owning side hibernate supports Lazy loading, it's just not enabled by default. You need to add it #OneToOne(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
But when you have that mapped bidirectionaly (on both entities), as you said hibernate needs to query the table to decide between null or proxy. So devs decided to eager load the whole entity. Regardless of the fetch type.
You can avoid theese problems by getting rid of the foreign key and just use same primary key vaue.
You can do that with #MapsId annotation on the owning side.
#Entity
public class Owning {
#Id
private Long id;
#OneToOne
#MapsId
#JoinColumn(name = "id")
private Child child;
}

Why would you use #JoinTable annotation instead of Unidirectional #OneToMany annotation within Java

I am learning persistence with Hibernate (and JPA) on Udemy and the presenter explains an alternative to the previous associations discussed (unidirectional OneToOne, bidirectional OneToOne, Unidirectional OneToMany, bidirectional OneToMany), called the #JoinTable JPA annotation.
He mentions that sometimes only a small selection of the "Many" entities are associated with a specific kind of "One" entities and that we don't want a field on the "Many" entity to embody the association with the "One" entity since that field will remain null for most instances. He goes on to recommend the #JoinTable for this situation.
My question is, considering the effect of the #JoinTable option on the Java entities, why not just use the Unidirectional #OneToMany annotation on the "One" entity and leave the "Many" entity as-is? Which additional features would #JoinTable bring to the situation from within Java beyond what Unidirectional #OneToMany brings?

Then he is clearly wrong, #JoinTable is definitely not necessary here and will introduce overhead in terms of memory (more data to store) and time complexity (another table to join).
You're right about that you only need #JoinColumn to map one-to-one and one-to-many relationships (and mappedBy on the other side if it should be bidirectional).
P.S.: I would consider going further with this course, as it seems to be flawed even with the very basics of jpa.

Saving an array of Entities in another entity with Hibernate

I have a Task entity that should contain an array of User entities in a #OneToMany relationship.
But I can't figure out a way to store said array without having a link table, since a User may be referenced in multiple Tasks.
The relationship should look like such, in TaskEntity:
#OneToMany(mappedBy = "user")
private Set<UserEntity> users = new HashSet<>(0);
What would be the proper way of doing it? How can a single row save an array of entities?

You can avoid join table (but it is not advised to do so, see below) for unidirectional one-to-many relationship. It would require foreign key to be on the target side of relationship(many side of relationship). You would need to specify a #JoinColumn annotation to point to the foreign key column.
#OneToMany
#JoinColumn(name="TASK_ID")
private Set<UserEntity> users = new HashSet<>(0);
It is not advisable, because of the following :
1) Performance : if both UserEntity state and Task states are changed, upon writing to UserEntity the FK to Task is not known, because UserEntity does not have reference to it. So in this case UserEntity might be written twice, once for UserEntity changes and once for Task changes.
2) Mapping : if UserEntity is assigned to a different task, and there is no reference back to Task from UserEntity, there will be no changes in context.
So it is advisable to go for Join Table in your case.

So a User can have many Tasks and each Task can have many Users.
Sounds like a classic fan-trap, you will need a link table and to use #ManyToMany.
However the Data-Structure should be modeled before looking into data access implementation.
What you have described is a Many to Many relationship, and your database structure should reflect that, before you think about how you can retrieve the data with Hibernate.

Hibernate Annotation Confusion

Recently, I have been learning about Hibernate, and I am facing some difficulties. My first problem is as follows: I am very much confused with the below terms.
Bidirectional mapping
Many to One
Because, as far as I know, in rdbms we first need to insert in parent table. Then we can insert on child table, so the only possible scenario is one-to-many (first parent then children). Then, how is many-to-one is going to work? Second, what is this bidirectional mapping in regards to Hibernate. Specifically, different types of join annotations confuse me a lot. I am listing those annotations below.
1.#JoinTable(name = "Tbale_Name", joinColumns = { #JoinColumn(name = "Column_Name") },
inverseJoinColumns = { #JoinColumn(name = "Another_ColumnName") })
2.#OneToMany(mappedBy="department")` this mappedby term
3.#PrimaryKeyJoinColumn
Please help me understand these concepts.

The first thing I would say is don't think in terms of tables but think in terms of Objects.
What you are trying to express with the annotations is the relationship between objects, let hibernate work out how to persist the data. You can obviously manually check the SQL but the idea of using an ORM is to map the relationships between entities accordingly and let the ORM figure out the complexity around generating SQL etc.
Its worth noting that the parent -> child relation can be mapped using #ManyToOne by adding mappedBy to the non-owning (child) side of the relationship. Hibernate then will determine which entities to insert into the database first. Running with a TransactionManager will enforce integrity with multi table inserts. Hibernate will also workout which entities need to be persisted, for example if you add an new object on the many side to an existing object on the one side.
Furthermore, its worth understanding that in some cases it won't always be the database that generates the primary key in a parent -> child foreign key. Its possible for the code to generate the Identifier and hibernate will persist them according.
Bidirectional mapping means that object entities have a reference to each other. i.e. You can retrieve the second entity from the first entity. Bidirectional mapping supports one-to-many
or many-to-many. I.e. OneToMany = a Set on one of the entities. Many-To-Many = Sets on both entities.
JoinTable tells hibernate that a table in the database can be used to map to other tables together. See JPA "#JoinTable" annotation for more information. JoinColumn tells hibernate what column to use to make the join between the two entities. Hibernate needs these to construct the SQL.

Persist multiple objects at one go

My current project uses JPA and HSQLDB.
I would like to persist multiple related objcts at one go, is that by any means possible in JPA?
Ex: Suppose there are two entities like Person and ContactInfo, where Person has List<ContactInfo> entities.
If I want to persist Person entity along with ContactInfos also, what I am doing is set the list in Person and call persist. Will doing that take care of persisting List<ContactInfo> also? (With foreign key reference to Person ID in database table)
Else kindly let mek now how would I achieve this in JPA.
Regards,
Satya

It will, if you set #*ToMany(cascade=CascadeType.PERSIST)

You could do as Bozho suggested, but if you would also like them to be updated, deleted, etc. when it's done with Person, I would suggest to cascade like that:
#OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, orphanRemoval = true)
Note: orphanRemoval will only work with JPA 2.