title: Best way to detect duplicates when using Spring Hibernate Template
body: <p>We have an application which needs to detect duplicates in certain fields on create.  We are using Hibernate as our persistence layer and using Spring's HibernateTemplate.  My question is whether it is better to do so an upfront lookup for the item before creating, or to attempt to catch the DataIntegrityViolation exception and then check if this is caused by a duplicate entry.</p>