org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: Could not execute JDBC batch update

Your Event.hbm.xml says:

<set name="attendees" cascade="all">
    <key column="attendeeId" />
    <one-to-many class="Attendee" />
</set>

In plain english, this means that the column Attendee.attendeeId is the foreign key for the association attendees and points to the primary key of Event.

When you add those Attendees to the event, hibernate updates the foreign key to express the changed association. Since that same column is also the primary key of Attendee, this violates the primary key constraint.

Since an Attendee's identity and event participation are independent, you should use separate columns for the primary and foreign key.

Edit: The selects might be because you don't appear to have a version property configured, making it impossible for hibernate to know whether the attendees already exists in the database (they might have been loaded in a previous session), so hibernate emits selects to check. As for the update statements, it was probably easier to implement that way. If you want to get rid of these separate updates, I recommend mapping the association from both ends, and declare the Event-end as inverse.

You can find your sample code completely here: http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/Hibernate/OneToManyMappingbasedonSet.htm

Have a look and check the differences. specially the even_id in :

<set name="attendees" cascade="all">
    <key column="event_id"/>
    <one-to-many class="Attendee"/>
</set>