Based on most discussions online and at conferences, there seem to be 2 kinds of projects that use Hibernate for their persistence layer: So, what’s the difference between these projects? Are the projects in the 2nd group more complex or have higher performance requirements? No, based on my consulting projects, that’s not the case. On…

Databases support various data types to store date and time information. The most commonly used ones are: You can map all of them with JPA and Hibernate. But you need to decide to which Java type you want to map your database column. The Java language supports a bunch of classes to represent date and…

The Date and Time API, introduced in Java 8, finally replaced the old java.util.Date. It’s much easier to use and finally offers separate classes representing date, date with time, and only time information. That not only improves your business code but also makes it easier to use them as entity attributes. At least if you’re…

Choosing the right FetchType is one of the most important decisions when defining your entity mapping. It specifies when your JPA implementation, e.g., Hibernate, fetches associated entities from the database. You can choose between EAGER and LAZY loading. The first one fetches an association immediately, and the other only when you use it. I explain…

In some applications, you don’t want to or are not allowed to remove a record from the database permanently. But you still need to remove or hide records which are no longer active. One example could be a user account you want to keep because it is linked to other business objects that are still…