I'd rather play golf

I have uploaded a Sybase PowerDesigner whitepaper entitled Generating Hibernate 3.0 Persistent Objects with PowerDesigner that describes the comprehensive support within PowerDesigner 12 and up for Hibernate object-relational mappings, including generating Hibernate artifacts such as configuration files, mapping files, and Java class files. In subsequent articles, I’ll look at specific functionality within PowerDesigner’s Hibernate support, [...]

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In several earlier posts I have described how to reverse-engineer a SQL Anywhere database to generate Hibernate configuration files and the corresponding Java classes, using Middlegen (now obsolete) with Ant, and the Hibernate Tools plug-in within Eclipse Ganymede. In my experience neither Middlegen nor the Hibernate Tools plug-in are particularly robust. The Middlegen software is [...]

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On Tuesday, 15 December 2009 I’ll be presenting a one-hour webinar entitled “Object-relational Mappers: Friend or foe?”: Object relational mappers (ORMs) such as LINQ, Hibernate, and ActiveRecord bridge the gap between the relational database world, and the object-oriented world. By abstracting the database into “virtual database objects”, they let programmers develop in any language and [...]

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Yesterday I arranged for a new Hibernate dialect for SQL Anywhere 11 to be posted on sybase.com. This new SQL Anywhere 11 dialect is a minor revision to the SQL Anywhere 10 dialect. SQLAnywhere11Dialect.class enables support of JDBC statement batching for SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE DML statements. Batching support was added to the iAnywhere [...]

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Object-relational mapping toolkits such as Hibernate/NHibernate, LINQ, and others permit one to develop object-oriented database applications in the paradigm offered by the object-oriented language (Java, C#, C++) and workaround the issues of the impedance mismatch between the application’s abstractions and the persistent relational store. My colleague Jason Hinsperger has written previously regarding the additional complexity [...]

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This afternoon I gave a presentation to the Database Research Group at the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. The talk gives a brief overview of ORM technology and the problems it is designed to solve, then discusses some of the technology using Java Hibernate as an example. I accompanied the talk [...]

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In my last post on reverse-engineering the SQL Anywhere sample database, demo.db, I showed how to set up the Hibernate Tools plugin within Eclipse to generate the Hibernate mapping files for the “sports retailer” schema in demo.db. In this post, we’ll go one step further and generate skeleton Java classes to implement the mappings so [...]

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An issue that is universal to object-relational mapping tools is that of object identity. In a nutshell, the problem to be solved is to guarantee that two objects to be made persistent in the relational database can be distinguished if they are separate object instances within the programming language environment. As an example, here’s what [...]

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In my last post, I documented a technique to reverse-engineer the sample database, demo.db, that ships with SQL Anywhere using the Hibernate Tools reverse-engineering facility run from Ant. Here, I’ll document how to reverse-engineer a SQL Anywhere database using the Hibernate Tools plugin from within Eclipse. Setting up a Hibernate configuration file After I established [...]

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In my last post I described the process for installing the Hibernate Tools. In this post, I’ll describe reverse-engineering the SQL Anywhere sample database, demo.db, using Hibernate Tools in batch mode with Apache Ant 1.7.1. In part I wanted to start with the Ant batch process because I had such difficulty installing the Eclipse Hibernate [...]

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