Basil Vandegriend: Professional Software Development

Audit columns are a common design pattern used to record data creation and modification information for database tables. A typical implementation of this pattern is to add four columns to every non-static database table: CREATE_USER, CREATE_TIMESTAMP, UPDATE_USER, and UPDATE_TIMESTAMP. The create columns are populated only when a record is initially populated, while the update columns […]

My previous article started discussing Hibernate relationships, focusing on lazy versus non-lazy relationships. This article continues the theme by discussing how to improve performance when dealing with relationships in Hibernate through a feature called eager fetching.
Hibernate’s abstraction of database access behind getter and setter methods on domain objects hides potentially inefficient database access. Mindlessly using […]

Support for entity relationships is a great time-saving feature in Hibernate, but it can also be a trap for the unsuspecting developer. Handling relationships between entities can be a complex business, and I for one am glad for all the support that Hibernate provides. Hibernate’s assistance, however, can do more harm than good when it […]

Hibernate tries to hide the details of dealing with relational databases, but it is at best a leaky abstraction. At its most basic level, Hibernate is a framework that issues SQL commands to the database. Sometimes it does not do what you would expect or want (more on that in future articles). Therefore it is […]

Hibernate is a de facto standard for object-relational mapping. One of my recent projects involved the use of the latest version of Hibernate (3.2). Since I had not used Hibernate since its version 2 days, I picked up the authoritative reference Java Persistence with Hibernate which is co-authored by Gavin King, the founder of […]