The Criteria interface of Hibernate ORM , represents a query against a particular persistent class. The interface provides access to the powerful mechanism of hibernate criteria API, that allows the programmatic creation of queries against the DB.
Hibernate provides an alternate way of HQL to manipulate objects and it is called Hibernate Criteria Query. The Hibernate Session interface provides createCriteria() method which can be used to create a Criteria object. This criteria object returns instances of the persistence object's class when the application executes a criteria query.
The primary advantage of Criteria Query over HQL and native SQL is that it allows OOP control over the queries and hence it is more dynamic compared to HQL. In order to make HQL dynamic String concatenation needs to be done, which is not considered as a good programming concept.
To learn more about Criteria Query and it's usage the official website of Hibernate is a very good resource.
