Which is better when using JPA, especially when starting a new project?
Start with designing entities and then let JPA generate the database or
Start with the database schema and let tools generate entity classes?
im part of a small company. im both the software developer and DBA. i have complete freedom for the application and db design
im just starting the project
If you want to design a database, then start with the schema. If you want to write software, then start with the entities. The point of an ORM is to let you think about an object model without having to worry about the database that stores it, so questions of this type actually confuse the issue somewhat by insinuating crossover between the realms. Are you a software developer or a DBA? That, much more than the fact that you're using JPA, is what will determine the correct answer for you.
Um - neither? The power of JPA is that you don't have to generate one from the other! Generation of entities or database schema might be a good starting place if you have one already in place; but the generated stuff is not something you will want to use long term.
You cannot simply design one side of the mapping without any consideration of the other. If you will share the database with other applications, you will need to give more weight to the database schema. If your application has a complex model, you will want to focus on the object model first, allowing it to be driven by the use cases you uncover as you develop your application.
I tend to start with the object model first (even without a backing database to start) because that allows me to see the application in action earlier and get a feel for what we really want to build. But integration with the database must happen earlier rather than later; as its constraints will quickly impose themselves on your object model. :-)
It depends on one's needs . Usually in a product development environment , there are different teams which work on database design , interface design and implementation . So in that case , you have no option than generating the JPA entities from the already database design.
Secondly , if you are starting from the scratch and you know what are you upto then you can probably start writing your own entities (java class) and then generate the database from that.
Better go for database Scheme. Because some of the features r not available in JPA generated database.In JPA We cant give default values for our column. Check HERE for the allowable attributes in JPA.
Its upto you. whether to go top-down or bottom up approach. In case this schema would be exclusive to your application, see how your team members and analysts understand ORM or DB. In my experience analysts are better understand in terms of tables. But if they are good to discuss in terms of classes or UML diagrams go with JPA. Also, take into consideration views of your DBA and build engineer.
If you have complete flexibility and are not restricted to a DB schema and want a clean object model in your java application then start with with the model first and generate the schema from the model. This also allows you to generate clean JSON representations from the clean model to serve as on-the-wire format for your objects using technologies like Jackson (or GSON).
Doing DB Schema first and reverse engineering model classes from it will result in relational concepts seeping into your model classes resulting in poor (polluted) model.
In summary do model first unless your hands are tied and you must map to some existing schema.
Related
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'm using Hibernate EntityManager and Hibernate Annotations for ORM in a very early stage project. The project needs to launch soon, but the specs are changing constantly and I am concerned that the system will be launched and live data will be collected, and then the specs will change again and I will be in a situation where I need to change the database schema.
How can I set things up in order to minimize the impact of this? Are there any open source projects that deal with this kind of migration? Can Hibernate do this automatically (without wiping the database)?
Your advice is much appreciated.
It's more a functional or organizational problem than a technical one. No tool will automatically guess how to migrate data from one schema to another one. You'd better learn how to write stored procedure in order to migrate your data.
You'll probably need to disable constraints, create temporary table and columns, copy lots of data, and then delete the temporary tables and columns and re-enable constraints to have migrate your data.
Once in maintenance mode, every new feature that modifies the schema should also come with the script allowing to migrate from the current schema and data in production to the new one.
No system can possibly create datamigration scripts automatically from just the original and the final schema. There just isn't enough information.
Consider for example a new column. Should it just contain the default value? Or a value calculated from other fields/tables.
There is a good book about refactoring databases: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-Addison-Wesley-Signature/dp/0321774515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300140045&sr=8-1
But there is little to no tool support for this kind of stuff.
I think the best thing you can do in advance:
Don't let anybody access the database but your application
If something else absolutely must access the db directly, give it a separate set of view specially for that purpose. This allows you to change your table structure by keeping at least the structure of what other systems see.
Have tons of tests. I just posted an article wich (with the upcoming 2nd and 3rd part) might help a little with this: http://blog.schauderhaft.de/2011/03/13/testing-databases-with-junit-and-hibernate-part-1-one-to-rule-them/
Hibernate can update the database entity model with data in the database. So do that and write migration code in java which sets or removes data relationships.
This works, and we have done it multiple times. But of course, try to follow a flexible development process; make what you know for sure first, then reevaluate the requirements - scrum etc.
In your case, I would recommend a NoSQL database. I don't have much experience with such kind of databases so I can't recommend any current implementation so you may want to check this too.
I am in need of some further information.
I am developing a small application which will be interacting with a PHP web application. The media server which we are incorporating with is extensible in Java.
I need very little access to the database inside the plugin which we are developing, I only need to view rows in about 10% of the tables. I only need to update data in 1 of the tables.
The schema as a whole is littered with foreign keys, but currently (and there is little chance this changes in the future) I do not need to modify any other information in the databse except for the one column (which is not a foreign key).
I don't really want to model all of these relationships -- as there is no need to.
What is my best bet? Will Hibernate make me map all of these domain objects? Is myBatis (formerly iBATIS) a better choice as the people I am handing off too are more comfortable with SQL? Does it matter which persistence framework I choose -- i.e. are they all going to make me model each of the tables?
These are mySQL InnoDB tables if it makes any difference.
Hibernate only requires you to map those items which you want to use within the context of your Java application. As a result, you can have objects only mapped to those tables which you desire access from the Java side.
A few caveats for the process though:
You will have to model all objects/relationships for all tables with which a given entity table will interact
Things could be messy with two programs hitting the database at the same time. While this is an issue that is accounted for and handled by Hibernate for locking, such things tend to fall by the wayside in PHP.
I can't really speak about Hibernate, but myBatis won't make you model anything - just create a POJO that contains the properties that you care about, then write mappings (in just straight sql) that map whatever columns from whatever tables you want into your pojo.
With Hibernate, you only need to model the objects you will be working with, and the ddl2hbm tool may be able to generate the Java classes for you based on the existing database, depending on if there are foreign keys linking to models you will not be using.
I am currently trying to wrap my head around working with JPA. I can't help but feel like I am missing something or doing it the wrong way. It just seems forced so far.
What I think I know so far is that their are couple of ways to work with JPA and tools to support this.
You can do everything in Java using annotations, and let JPA (whatever implementation you decide to use) create your schema and update it when changes are made.
You can use a tool to reverse engineer you database and generate the entity classes for you. When the schema is updated you have to regenerate these classes, or manually update them.
There seems to be drawbacks to both, and benefits to both (as with all things). My question is in an ideal situation what is the standard workflow with JPA? Most schemas will require updates during the maintenance phase and especially during the development phase, so how is this handled?
It's not always a good approach to generate the DB schema from the annotated entities. Although in theory it sounds great - in practice often the generated schema is not optimal and would not satisfy and experienced DBA.
The approach that I follow in my workflow is to create the entities and db schema separately, while still using a pretty intelligent tool for the schema creating - either something like Liquibase, that is database agnostic, supports revisions, rollbacks, etc... or a custom baked migration tool that simply runs heavily optimized db specific sql scripts.
It probably sounds to you less than ideal, but I can assure it gets the jobs done and keep your schema related code consistent since, as grigory pointed out - not everything related to the database can be generated from the entities anyways.
I can, however, be useful to generate the schema from the entities for the test database against which unit and integration tests are being run. Assuming you're using say PostgreSQL is production you might decide to speed things up for the unit tests running some embedded in-memory database like H2 which gets created from the entities before the tests are started and disappears automatically(since it was in-memory) after the tests finish executing. This is a very common practice.
As usual the answer is it depends...
Ideal approach (in ideal world) would probably be your 1st option: maintain everything using JPA annotations and forward engineer database artifacts using utility tool (e.g. use Hibernate Maven plugin).
It depends on the level of support for your database artifacts - not everything either belongs or suitable for annotations. That is why my projects usually use parallel maintenance for both and using unit tests to keep them in sync.
It also depends on resources available. If you have a dedicated DBA who is responsible for your database then delegating maintenance to her would make sense.
Other consideration is how much database development is really done in JPA. Are there also stored procedures or other non-JPA applications that use the same back-end, or maybe you just integrate with other team's database...
If this is an existing application, I would check what you have existing, if the database structure complex as can be seen with the DDL and the DDL shows significant logic is being done on the database itself, then you are better off using plain SQLs and let the DBA maintain your data structures. JPA does not really lend well when the database structures are already complicated and there is no business benefit to use JPA at that point.
What needs to happen is a project to migrate to JPA. There are a few advantages to that:
Business Logic is removed from the database layer (which is harder to scale horizontally) to the application tier.
Java developers are generally cheaper compared to a DBA. Though you still need someone who can do both database thinking and Java thinking to do this properly and that's more rare.
By reducing the database to become as simple datastore, you can break yourself from vendor lock-in.
If done right, you can have a different database for development (can be DB2 Express C which is free) and have a more robust database for your integration and production environments (e.g. DB/2 for zOS). This allows you to be able to have more developers without worrying about licensing costs as much.
As for schemas being generated and such, there are actually four workflows that can occur:
For design, an Object-Relational (rather than an Entity-Relational) diagram serves as a contract between the application team and the database team. The end result is the JPA objects will run in the physical data structure that the DBA sets.
For Java application development, just let each developer have their own database and let them blow it up as much as they want. The JPA code will generate the schemas for you.
For database development, the generated schemas and class diagrams are passed onto review by the DBA to see where performance can be improved upon. Specifically they are there to specify the indices which are not available in the JPA standard since it is not cross database. They are also there to set up the table spaces and all the access controls and schemas for the development, but at least the gist of the structure can be taken away from them and passed onto the application team which gives the application team more flexibility to adapt to changes. What would normally happen is the DBA just includes some generated SQL and then have alters to add additional columns and others that would be used for other purposes outside of the application (the JPA structure needs only what is needed by the application, it does not need to map one-to-one 100% to the database)
For migration, the DBA needs to do a differential analysis between the two schemas. There's a program called dbsolo (not free) that can do it with most databases. However, if things were done in JPA, the structures are simpler since in theory there is no longer any business logic on the database thus reducing the complexity of data migrations due to upgrades.
The net of it is you can't just say you're using JPA without involving the whole delivery team which will have to include the DBA willing to relinquish control and ownership of the structure of the data to the application team, but still be part of the design and reviews.
I am starting out writing java code and interacting with databases for my "nextbigthing" project. Can someone direct me towards the best way to deal with adding/updating tables/records to databases? Here is my problem. There is too much repitition when it comes to DB code in java. I have to create the tables first (I use mysql). I then create classes in Java for each table. Then I create a AddRow, DeleteRow, UpdateRow and Search* depending on my need. For every table, every need creating this huge ass sql statement and the classes all seems like a huge waste of my time. There has to be a better, easier, more efficient way of doing things. Is there something out there that I do not know that will let me just tell Java what the table is and it automatically generate the queries and execute them for me? Its simple SQL that can be auto generated if it knows the column names and DB table inter dependencies. Seems like a very reasonable thing to have.
Check out Hibernate - a standard Java ORM solution.
User hibernate for mapping your classes to Database.
Set its hbm2ddl.auto to update to avoid writing DDL yourself. But note that this is not the most optimal way to take it to production.
Consider using Hibernate:
https://www.hibernate.org/
It can create java classes with regular CRUD methods from existing database schema.
Of course there is a much better way !
You really want to learn some bits of Java EE, and in particular JPA for database access.
For a complete crash course on Java EE, check out the Sun the Java EE 5 tutorial.
http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/tutorial/doc/
Part 4 - Enterprise Beans
Part 5 - Persistence (JPA)
Then you want to try Hibernate (for instance) which has an implementation of JPA.
This is for Java 5 or later.
If you are still in Java 2, you might want to try Hibernate or iBatis.
You can also try iBatis, if you want control over SQL. Else JPA is good.
You can also try using Seam Framework. It has good reverse-engineering tools.
There is also torque (http://db.apache.org/torque/) which I personally prefer because it's simpler, and does exactly what I need.
With torque I can define a database with mysql(Well I use Postgresql, but Mysql is supported too) and Torque can then query the database and then generate java classes for each table in the database. With Torque you can then query the database and get back Java objects of the correct type.
It supports where clauses (Either with a Criteria object or you can write the sql yourself) and joins.
It also support foreign keys, so if you got a User table and a House table, where a user can own 0 or more houses, there will be a getHouses() method on the user object which will give you the list of House objects the user own.
To get a first look at the kind of code you can write, take a look at
http://db.apache.org/torque/releases/torque-3.3/tutorial/step5.html which contains examples which show how to load/save/query data with torque. (All the classes used in this example are auto-generated based on the database definition).
Or, if Hibernate is too much, try Spring JDBC. It eliminates a lot of boilerplate code for you.
iBatis is another good choice, intermediate between Spring JDBC and Hibernate.
It's just a matter of using the right tools. Use an IDE with tools to autogenerate the one and other.
If you're using Eclipse for Java EE and decide to head to JPA, then I can recommend to take benefit of the builtin Dali plugin. There's a nice PDF tutorial out at Eclipse.org.
If you're using Eclipse for Java EE and decide to head to "good ol" Hibernate, then I can recommend to take benefit of the Hibernatetools plugin. There's good reference guide out at Hibernate.org.
Both tools are capable of reverse-engineering from a SQL table to fullworthy Javabeans/entities and/or mapping files. It really takes most of boilerplate pains away. The DAO pattern is slightly superflous when grabbing JPA. In case of Hibernate you can consider to use a Generic DAO.