Random Notes on Hibernate

Hibernate is a data persistence framework for use in Java (and by code written in still other languages). Hibernate's purpose is to abstract schema from any database into a Java format for consumption by code thereby isolating the business data from the actual workings of the code. This means that the result of a query is an instance of a class or a set or collection of instances and not rows or tables. BIG WARNING: You must be VERY careful when using a tutorial off the web to learn Hibernate. There is much XML involved. Often, the authoring used to get the article to the web substitutes crap for syntactically crucial contructions and individual characters, especially double-quotes, single-quotes and hyphens. If you get these wrong, an editor such as the one in Eclipse will give you funny colors and you should realize this. However, if you do not, you'll tear your hair out as Hibernate rejects your configuration file and mapping files. Links There are a great many tutorials and other help for Hibernate.
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Fast-forwarded video tutorial. Operates at lightspeed. This is amazing and too fast. Yet, if you've begun studying Hibernate, it makes a great deal of sense and boils everything down to a very useful 10 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLOiW9Lw4mo http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html/tutorial.html http://www.hibernatetutorial.com/index.html The main tutorial (pre-Java 5 unfortunately): http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html/index.html Best practices. Portability considerations. Very good series, almost a text book, on Hibernate with a tutorial that starts with JDBC so you can see why Hibernate. This started out well, but in the end, the tutorial lacked code for two of the classes. Hibernate with MySQL a beginner's guide, Part 1.

Hibernate with MySQL

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a beginner's guide, Part 2.

First Hiberate Tutorial: Get Hands-on Experience. This one uses Eclipse. Spring JPA Tutorial: Get Hands-on Experience. This one uses Eclipse. Hibernate basics. This is a really useful article that doesn't gloss over topics as do others. The RoseIndia tutorial, a little hard to read, but the examples can dispell questions you may have. The code in this one is pretty useful too.

Hibernate dialects The following is a list of dialects Hibernate "speaks." The classpath noted is the one to use in hibernate.properties or hibernate.cfg.xml.

DB2 org.hibernate.dialect.DB2Dialect HypersonicSQL org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect Informix org.hibernate.dialect.InformixDialect Ingres org.hibernate.dialect.IngresDialect Interbase org.hibernate.dialect.InterbaseDialect Pointbase org.hibernate.dialect.PointbaseDialect PostgreSQL org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect Mckoi SQL org.hibernate.dialect.MckoiDialect Microsoft SQL Server org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect MySQL org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect Oracle org.hibernate.dialect.OracleDialect Oracle 9 org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle9Dialect Progress org.hibernate.dialect.ProgressDialect FrontBase org.hibernate.dialect.FrontbaseDialect SAP DB org.hibernate.dialect.SAPDBDialect Sybase org.hibernate.dialect.SybaseDialect Sybase Anywhere org.hibernate.dialect.SybaseAnywhereDialect

Paging efficiency

It would appear that it's more efficient to use < and > than <= or >= in terms of what Hibernate will cause to happen underneath, though this is all entirely dependent upon the database interfaced. Hibernate's query language See http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html/queryhql.html.

from

Sort of like SELECT *. For example,

from table.Person from Person

returns all instances of the class Person. as Alias; assigns a "variable" to a result by which it may subsequently be referred. For example,
from Person as person

join

inner join, left outer join, etc. For example,

from Person as person join person.spouse as spouse left join person.children as child

where order by group by and having

As in SQL. For example,

from Person where name="Fritz"

As in SQL. Like where but for sets. For example,

select car.color from Car as car group by car.color having car.color in (Color.METALLIC, Color.BLACK)

Some useful database definitions The following are useful:

join

inner join

A join clause combines records from two or more tables. Its result is a set that can be saved as a table or merely consumed and discarded (as a set). A join combines fields using values common to each table. There are four types of joins: inner, outer, left and right. In many systems, the default join (in the absense of more specific terminology or keywords) is the inner join. Result obtained from combining values of two tables base on the predicate (A.one-thing = B.another-thing), e.g.:

SELECT * FROM employee, department INNER JOIN department ON employee.departmentid = department.departmentid;

This is really just a formal notation for:

SELECT * FROM employee WHERE employee.departmentid = department.departmentid

equijoin natural join outer join left join right join full outer join self join

...and has the result of selecting those employees who work for an explicit, existing department. An inner join where only 'equals' is used (and not 'greater than' or 'less than', etc.) Where the result is created only from columns whose name matches (e.g.: 'departmentid' as opposed to 'deptid' and 'departmentid'). Subdivided between left- and right outer joins. All records of the table are retained as the result (i.e.: all rows from the left table or all from the right table). Also left outer join, retains records from first table, see Wikipedia. Also right outer join, retains records from second table, see Wikipedia. Retains records from both sides (tables). See Wikipedia. Joins a table to itself. See Wikipedia.