I am making a web app with Spring Boot. I am planning on using Spring Data JPA (Hibernate) connected to MySQL. One question I have is that I have already written out the SQL statements to create my database schema. I have my primary keys, foreign keys, relationships all set already. All the tutorials I've seen assume you don't have tables or anything in the database already. If I create entities, how can I ensure they match up to my already existing data model?
I don't mind recreating the entities by hand, since there's not that many classes and manually reverse-engineering won't take too much time. (I have seen a way to reverse engineering using Eclipse but I prefer to use IntelliJ, also I feel that manually writing the Entities may be easier than doing the reverse process.) But I want to make sure that the entity objects I create will match the tables I already have and won't cause trouble. I'm not sure what the best way to go about doing this is. Will Hibernate overwrite my existing schema when I run for the first time?
You can make hibernate to validate your mapping.
Set this property :
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=validate
I spent all of yesterday reading various articles/tutorials on Hibernate and although I am blown-away by how powerful it is, I have one major concern with it.
It seems that the standard practice is to allow Hibernate to design/generate your DB schema for you, which is a new and scary concept that I am choking on. From the tutorials I read, you just add a new entity to your hibernate.cfg.xml config file, annotate any POJO you want with #Entity, and voila - Hibernate creates the tables for you. Although this is very cool, it has me wondering about a handful of scenarios:
What if you already have a DB schema and the one Hibernate wants to generate for you does not conform to it? What if you have a crazy DBA that refuses to budge on the pre-defined (non-Hibernate) schema?
What if you have reference tables with tens of thousands of records in it (like all the cities in the world)? Would you have to instantiate and save() tens of thousands of unique POJOs or is there a way to configure Hibernate so it will honor and not overwrite data already existing in your tables?
What if you want to do perf tuning on your schema/tables? This includes indexing, normalizing above and beyond what Hibernate creates automatically?
What if you want to add constraints or triggers to your tables? Indexes?
I guess at the root of this is the following:
It looks like Hibernate creates and forces a particular schema/config on your DB. I am wondering how this agenda will conflict with our platform standards, our DBA philosophies, and our ability to perf tune/tweak tables that Hibernate interacts with.
Thanks in advance.
I think you're attributing too much power to Hibernate.
Hibernate does have an idiom that may influence database implementation.
Hibernate does not generate a schema for you unless you ask it to do so. It's possible to start with an existing schema and map it to Java objects using Hibernate. But it might not be possible or optimal if the schema conflicts with Hibernate requirements.
If the DBA won't budge - as they shouldn't - or Hibernate can't accomodate you, then you have your answer: you can't use Hibernate.
Your DBA might consent, but your app might find that the dynamic SQL that's generated for you by Hibernate isn't what you want.
Fortunately for you, it's not the only game in town.
I don't think implementations have to be all or none. If you use simple JDBC to access reference data, what's the harm?
Database design considerations should be independent of Hibernate. Constraints, triggers, normalization, and indexes should be driven by business needs, not your middleware choices.
If you don't have a solid object model, or the schema can't accomodate it, then you should reconsider Hibernate. There's straight JDBC, stored procedures, Spring JDBC, and iBatis as alternatives.
Hibernate comes with a default way to map objects to tables - like several tools/libraries, it favours convention over configuration for simplicity.
However, if you want to map the entities to database tables differently, you can explicitly tell Hibernate how these are mapped (from simple attributes such as changing the table name, through to redefining the foreign-key relationships between related entities and how this is persisted).
If you do this correctly, you don't need to instantiate and save existing data, as this would be pointless - the database already contains the information about the entities in exactly the form that Hibernate understands. (Think about it - to load and then immediately save an entity should always be a no-op, and so can be skipped altogether.)
So the short answer to your question is "no". If you don't care for designing tables, you can let Hibernate adopt a reasonable default. If you do want to design your schema explicitly though, you can do this and then describe that exact schema to Hibernate.
As someone who's worked on java and hibernate in the enterprise for a long time, I have seen very few projects which use this capability. You'll see some build tools and other things do this, but for a real enterprise app, i've never seen this.
Most DBA's won't let the application user create tables. They rely on a privileged user to do those things, and the user that the app connects as would have r/w privs on the data but not the schema itself.
As a result, you write the SQL yourself, and you do the hibernate mappings to match. It doesn't mean your object design won't influence your SQL, but you should still always create your schema upfront.
No. You can use hibernate tools to generate the entities from existing database.
There are 2 ways you can go about in using Hibernate. If you have good DBA or database designer, then it is better to design the database and then map it into hibernate.
On the other hand if you don't have DBA and have good developer then let Hibernate generate Database for you.
The concept behind Hibernate is to map Database and the Objects. So it is called as ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool.
Read here for Object Relational Impedance.
This is the preferred way for a quick'n dirty prototype or a simple tutorial, but it's far from being the preferred way for any production application. I largely prefer designing the database independently, using scripts to generate the schema, tables, views, indexes, etc., and map the schema to entities.
As long as the mapping finds the tables and columns in the database, everything is fine.
As soon as you have data in your database and the schema must change, you'll have to write migration scripts anyway. You can't just drop everything and restart from scratch. The tutorials are written for developers starting with Hibernate and who must discover Hibernate as quick as possible, without dealing with complex SQL scripts.
What if you already have a DB schema ...
I don't know where you get that impression. Hibernate can use existing schema. It is quite flexible.
What if you have reference tables ...
Make the relationship LAZY, and it won't load automatically. Only changed object will be saved.
What if you want to do perf tuning ...
Just don't use the generated schema. It is just a starting point. You can customize as you need.
What if you want to add constraints or triggers to your tables? Indexes?
Some as above.
You can use hibernate with an existing database schema.
You can use various annotations to map to existing tables and columns, for example:
#Table(name = "dbschema.dbTable") - should be placed before your class file to map it
#Column(name = "colName") - to map a column
Just be sure that the hibernate is configured with this option:
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update
If you set this to create it will create the schema, so do not do this in your case.
Use hibernate/jpa when appropiate. A common practice when designing apps is to extract the draft and alter it manually after needs (indices etc). However, it will be a pain for you if you change the db layout from hibernate way to do things. Lots of the beauty of JPA will be lost. For tasks which require heavy performance tuning and full control - just go for reguar jdbc.
Some answers:
A. It is possible to add an index annotation : see the table annotation.
B. If you have reference tables, you may choose to have lazy fetching or eager fetching (i.e - if your tables represent a person and a its books - whether to load a person without its book, or with its books)
C. Hibernate can be used to work on existing schema. The schema might not be trivial to work with , but as other have said, you should design db only according to business needs, and not according to framework conventions
D. I would like to encourage you also to read what hibernate does "under the hood" - it uses lots of usage of proxies, which hurts performance, you must understand well the scope of session , and the usages of 1st level and 2nd level cache .
E. Following what I wrote at section D - working with triggers will cause your DB to change "under the hood" when it comes to hibernate. Consider a case where updating a record will create (using a trigger) an entry in some archiving table , and let's say this table is also annotated via hibernate - your hibernate caching will not be aware of the change that happend outside of the application scope.
F. It is important to me to state that I'm not against Hibernate, but you should not use it for all solutions, this is a mistake I did in the past. I now work with Spring-JDBC and I'm quite pleased (for our application needs it will be hard to use Hibernate, and I assume we will consider this only in the case we need to support more than one DB flavor).
I search a way in a spring 3.x application to manage many database.
Now we support mysql, but we need to support firebird and postgress sql.
we don't use orm.
what is the best way to support many database with spring?
You'll have multiple data sources - one for each JDBC driver you need. You'll have to find a way to select which one you want for a give case.
Once you define a data source per database, as duffymo said, define a transaction-manager for each, and you can use #Transactional("managerXname") for declarative transaction demarcation.
Im currently working my way towards JPA 2.0 and I start of liking how easy it is to maintain persistent data.
What I'm currently trying to accomplish is using JPA in a basic desktop application. The application should allow me to open embedded databases which are on my file system. I chose H2 databases for now, but I can really live switching to JavaDB or anything else.
What Im trying to accomplish is, that one can open the database file without previously define a persistence-unit in the persistence.xml file.
I can easily define a unit and persist objects, but it needs to be configured first.
I want to write some sort of database browser which allows opening without preconfiguration and recompiling.
http://www.objectdb.com/java/jpa/start/connection
I saw that ObjectDB allows access for this type of PersistenceFactory creation, but I was not able to transfer this example to other databases.
Am I totally wrong with the way I approach this probblem? Is JPA not designed with on-the-fly database access?
Thank you for your help,
Johannes
Not part of the JPA standard. Some implementations may offer their own API to do it. For example with DataNucleus if you go to this page http://www.datanucleus.org/products/accessplatform_3_0/jpa/persistence_unit.html at the end you can create dynamic persistence-units (and hence EMFs), and that implementation obviously allows persistence to the widest range of datastores you'll get anywhere
You can pass a Map of properties to createEntityManagerFactory() call that defines the database connection info, etc. The property names are the same as in the persistence.xml. I assume most JPA providers support this, EclipseLink does.
You will still need to define the set of classes for the database and map them.
If you do not have any classes either, than you could look into EclipseLink's dynamic support,
http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/Examples/JPA/Dynamic
If you want to make a database browser accessing different databases, you can't use a PU/Entity Manager (imo).
You'll need a dialogue asking a user for the IP/Port of the database, the username/password, the database name to access, and the type of database.
Then all you need to do is create a socket, send requests over the socket, and parse the response into a view.
Since both the request and the response are database specific, the user has to select the proper database driver.
Our application uses Hibernate for ORM, and stores data in several schemas, accessing them with a user whose grants are customized for the application.
The schema names are determined at runtime based on data; it's not feasible to include their names in the entity mapping documents. This means that I need a way to tell Hibernate to use a specific schema name when performing lookups. Is there a way to do this?
Here's a page that lists some ways you can manage multiple schemas in Hibernate. I'd probably go with implementing your own connection provider. You'll probably want to disable caching as well.
We ran into this problem at work. I fixed it, as Robert suggests, by creating a connection provider (ie, an implementation of DataSource), called ""OracleSchemaRemappingDataSource" and using spring to do the plumbing.
Basically, this datasource implements getConnection(). The implementation of that method works by getting a connection from some other data source by spring injection, which it assumes to be an oracle connection, and then executing
ALTER SESSION SET CURRENT_SCHEMA = 'someotherschema'
and them passing that connection back.
All of the hibernate config is careful to use names without specifying schemas for them.
Also: with this, you don't want to disable caching - allow hibernate to manage connections as normal, as we are not doing any magic within the app such as using different connections on a per-user basis.