What alternatives do I have to implement a union query using hibernate? I know hibernate does not support union queries at the moment, right now the only way I see to make a union is to use a view table.
The other option is to use plain jdbc, but this way I would loose all my example/criteria queries goodies, as well as the hibernate mapping validation that hibernate performs against the tables/columns.
Use VIEW. The same classes can be mapped to different tables/views using entity name, so you won't even have much of a duplication. Being there, done that, works OK.
Plain JDBC has another hidden problem: it's unaware of Hibernate session cache, so if something got cached till the end of the transaction and not flushed from Hibernate session, JDBC query won't find it. Could be very puzzling sometimes.