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Adding custom fields in my application

I have a SAAS product, which is build by Spring MVC and Hibernate. Generally SAAS products allow user's to customize the product like adding extra fields to the table. So i want to give the flexibility to users, to create custom fields in the tables for themselves. Please provide all the viable solutions to achieve it. Thank you so much for your help.

I'm guessing your trying to back this to a Relational database. The primary problem is that relational databases store things in tables, and tables don't really handle free form data well.
So one solution is to use a document structure that is flexible, like XML (and perhaps ditch the database) but databases have features which are nice, so let's also consider the database-using approaches.
You could create a "custom field" table which would have columns (composite primary key) for
ExtendedTable
ColumnName
but you'd also have to store the data somewhere
(ExtendedKey)
DataItem
And now we get into the really nasty bits. How would you apply constraints to this data? I mean, what would the type be of a DataItem? A general solution would be quite complex (being a type of free form database). Hopefully you could limit the solution to solve only the problems you require solved.
Another approach is to use a single "extra" column that contains an XML record which embeds it's own "column and value" extensions, but if you wanted to display a table of the efficiently, you'd have to parse out every XML document in every field, which is not ideal.
Neither one of these approaches will work well with the existing SQL query language, so you'll then start building your own query language.
I suggest you go back and look at real data requirements, instead of sweeping them under the table with a "and anything else one might want" set of columns on your table.

Your requirement is best suited use case for NoSQL databases (like MongoDB).
Dynamically creating relational database tables & columns (modifying schemas) upon user requests in an application is not a best practice as these involve DDL operations, which are very powerful and in case if you don't handle them carefully, the whole application's database goes to the inconsistent state.

Liquibase - common columns?

In my db every table has 4 common columns - DATE_CREATED, USER_CREATED, DATE_MODIFIED, USER_MODIFIED, and I want to propagate this rule to all new tables implicitly.
Is it possible to do it without having to generate liquibase script manually?

This is not possible using liquibase (as far as I know).
The reason for this is simple:
What if you change your mind and add/remove one of the default columns later? If you want to change all tables then this is not possible with liquibase as this would mean changing all changesets, which is not allowed.
Use a DSL to generate your liquibase scripts then you can add a certain set of columns to every entity but an automatic way would be difficult with the way liquibase works.

There is nothing built into Liquibase to support this.
Your easiest option would be to use XML document entities which is purely XML-level and therefore transparent to Liquibase. They would allow you to attach common XML into your changelog files.
A more complex approach would be to use the Liquibase extension system (http://liquibase.org/extensions) which allows you to redefine the logic to convert changeSets into SQL. That would allow you to inject any logic you want, including common data types, standard columns, or anything else.

I do not think so.
My suggesion, Dont add above mentioned 4 columns in all tables because there are possible to keep null values in all table for existing entries.
please create a table like Primary key id, table or entity name and your four column name.

Insert Query Builder for java

I have a use case where in I need to read rows from a file, transform them using an engine and then write the output to a database (that can be configured).
While I could write a query builder of my own, I was interested in knowing if there's already an available solution (library).
I searched online and could find jOOQ library but it looks like it is type-safe and has a code-gen tool so is probably suited for static database schema's. In the use case that I have db's can be configured dynamically and the meta-data is programatically read and made available for write-purposes (so a list of tables would be made available, user can select the columns to write and the insert script for these column needs to be dynamically created).
Is there any library that could help me with the use case?

If I understand correctly you need to query the database structure, display the result to via a GUI and have the user map data from a file to that structure?
Assuming this is the case, you're not looking for a 'library', you're looking for an ETL tool.
Alternatively, if you're set on writing something yourself, the (very) basic way to do this is:
the structure of a database using Connection.getMetaData(). The exact usage can vary between drivers so you'll need to create an abstraction layer that meets your needs - I'd assume you're just interested in the table structure here.
the format of the file needs to be mapped to a similar structure to the tables.
provide a GUI that allows the user to connect elements from the file to columns in the table including any type mapping that is needed.
create a parametrized insert statement based on file element to column mapping - this is just a simple bit of string concatenation.
loop throw the rows in the file performing a batch insert for each.
My advice, get an ETL tool, this sounds like a simple problem, but it's full of idiosyncrasies - getting even an 80% solution will be tough and time consuming.

jOOQ (the library you referenced in your question) can be used without code generation as indicated in the jOOQ manual:
http://www.jooq.org/doc/latest/manual/getting-started/use-cases/jooq-as-a-standalone-sql-builder
http://www.jooq.org/doc/latest/manual/sql-building/plain-sql
When searching through the user group, you'll find other users leveraging jOOQ in the way you intend

The setps you need to do is:
read the rows
build each row into an object
transform the above object to target object
insert the target object into the db
Among the above 4 steps, the only thing you need to do is step 3.
And for the above purpose, you can use Transmorph, EZMorph, Commons-BeanUtils, Dozer, etc.

Managing history records in a database

I have a web project that uses a database to store data that is used to generate tasks that would be processed for remote machines to alter that records and store new data. My problem here is that I have to store all that changes on each table but I don't need all these information. For example, a table A could have 5 fields but I only need 2 for historical purposes. Another table B could have 3 and I would have to add another one (date for example). Also, I don't need changes during daily task generation, only the most recent one.
Which is the best way to maintain a change history? Someone told me that a good idea is having two tables, the A (B) table and another one called A_history (B_history) with the needed fields. This is actually what I'm doing, using triggers to insert into history tables but I don't feel comfortable with this approach. My project uses Spring (Spring-data, Hibernate and JPA) and if I change the DB (currently MySQL) I'd have to migrate triggers. Is there a good way to manage history records? Tables could be generated with Hibernate/JPA annotations.
If I maintain the two tables approach, can I add a method to the repository to fetch rows from current table and history table at once?

For this pourpose there is a special Hibernate Envers project. See official documentation here. Just configure it, annotate necessary properties with #Audited annotation and that's all. No need for DB triggers.
One pitfall: if you want to have a record for each delete operation then you need to use Session.delete(entity) way instead of HQL "delete ...".
EDIT. Also take a look into native auditing support of spring data jpa.

I am not a database expert. What I have seen them do boils down to a few ways of approach.
1) They add a trigger to the transactional table that copies inserts and updates to a history table but not deletes. This means any queries that need to include history can be done from the history table since all the current info is there too.
a) They can tag each entry in the history table with time and date and
keep track of all the states of the original records.
b) They can only
keep track of the current state of the original record and then it
settles when the original is deleted.
2) They have a periodic task that goes around and copies data marked as deletable into the history table. It then deletes the data from the transactional table. Any queries in the transactional table have to make sure to ignore the deletable rows. Any queries that need history have to search both tables and merge the results.
3) If the volume of data isn't too large, they just leave everything in one table and mark some entries as historical. Queries have to ignore historical rows. Queries that include history are easy. This may slow down database access as the table grows to include many unused rows but that can sometimes be ameliorated by clever use of indexes.

dynamic object relation mapping

I am trying to create an application in java which pulls out records from the database and maps it to objects. It does that without knowing what the schema of the database looks like. All i want to do is fetch all rows from all tables and store them somewhere. There could be a thousand tables with thousands of records each. The application doesn't know the name of any table or attribute. It should map "on the fly". I looked at hibernate but it doesnt give me what i want for this app. I don't want to create hard-coded xml files and classes for mapping. Any ideas how i can accomplish this ?
Thanks

Oracle has a bunch of data dictionary views for metadata.
ALL_TABLES, ALL_TAB_COLUMNS would be first places to start. Then you'd build ad-hoc queries based on what you get out of there. Not sure whether you have to deal with all data types (dates, blobs, spatial, user-defined....).
Not sure what you mean by "store them somewhere". If you start thinking CSV or XML files, you'll need to escape various characters from VARCHAR2 columns.
If you are looking for some generic extract/unload routines, you should look at what is already available in the database or open-source/commercially.

MyBatis provides a pretty simple way to map data results to objects and back, maybe check that out?
http://code.google.com/p/mybatis/

Not to be flip, but for this task, you might want to check out Ruby on Rails and its ActiveRecord approach