Inheritance is one of the key concepts in Java. So, it’s no surprise that most developers want to use it in their domain model. Unfortunately, the relational table model doesn’t know this concept. So, Hibernate, or any other JPA implementation, has to apply a mapping strategy to map your inheritance hierarchy to one or more…
Working with timestamps with timezone information has always been a struggle. Since Java 8 introduced the Date and Time API, OffsetDateTime and ZonedDateTime have become the most obvious and commonly used types to model a timestamp with timezone information. And you might expect that choosing one of them should be the only thing you need…
JPA and Hibernate allow you to define associations between entities with just a few annotations, and you don’t have to care about the underlying table model in the database. Even join tables for many-to-many associations are hidden behind a @JoinTable annotation, and you don’t need to model the additional table as an entity. That changes…
When most developers design their table and entity models, they create tables that only use basic column types and map these to basic entity attributes. Even though these are the most commonly used types, they are not the only ones supported by modern relational databases and Hibernate. You can also use composite, JSON, and XML…
Most databases offer many proprietary features besides the known SQL standard. One example is PostgreSQL’s JSONB data type which allows you to store JSON documents efficiently in a database column. You could, of course, store the JSON document in a text column. That column type is part of the SQL standard. Hibernate and all other…