Some primary keys consist of more than 1 entity attribute or database column. These are called composite primary keys. They often contain a foreign key reference to a parent object or represent a complex natural key. Another reason to use composite keys is combining a domain-specific value with a simple counter, e.g., an order type…
Spring Data JPA’s repositories provide many methods that implement the standard operations you need to create a basic persistence layer. One of them is the save(S entity) method, which the CrudRepository defines. When you call this method, it depends on the entity object’s state which database operation Spring Data JPA performs. Spring Data JPA stores a new…
QueryDSL is a popular framework that provides you a Java API to create queries for relational databases and other data stores. If you’re familiar with JPA’s Criteria API, you might think that it does the same as QueryDSL and that you don’t need to learn about another framework. But I recommend you give QueryDSL a…
Database administrators often use views to combine, transform and present data in a form that’s easy to process and query by the application. They are easier to maintain and optimize than a complex query statement that’s developed and maintained in one or more applications. Using Spring Data JPA, you can map and query views in…
Hibernate and the JPA specification define multiple generators to create unique primary key values. An obvious question when learning about these generators is if you can apply them to basic attributes as well. Unfortunately, the answer is no. But Hibernate’s ValueGenerator provides an easy-to-use alternative. As I will show you in this article, you can…
