The regex that broke a server
Introduction I’ve never thought I would see an unresponsive server due to a bad regex matcher but that’s just happened to one of our services, yielding it unresponsive. Let’s assume we parse some external dealer car info. We are trying to find all those cars with “no air conditioning” among various available input patterns (but without matching patterns such as “mono air conditioning”).
JOOQ Facts: SQL functions made easy
Introduction The JDBC API has always been cumbersome and error-prone and I’ve never been too fond of using it. The first major improvement was brought by the Spring JDBC framework which simply revitalized the JDBC usage with its JdbcTemplate or the SqlFunction classes, to name a few. But Spring JDBC doesn’t address the shortcoming of using string function or input parameters names and this opened the door for type-safe SQL wrappers such as jOOQ. JOOQ is the next major step towards a better JDBC API and ever since I started using it… Read More
How to detect the Hibernate N+1 query problem during testing
Introduction In this article, you are going to learn how to automatically detect the N+1 query problem when using JPA and Hibernate using the Hypersistence Utils open-source project. With Hibernate, you manage entity state transitions, which are then translated to SQL statements. The number of generated SQL statements is affected by the current fetching strategy, Criteria queries, or Collection mappings, and you might not always get what you expected. Ignoring SQL statements is risky, and it may eventually put a heavy toll on the overall application performance. I’m a strong advocate of… Read More
Why I like Spring bean aliasing
Spring framework is widely used as a dependency injection container, and that’s for good reasons. First of all, it facilitates integration testing and it gives us the power of customizing bean creation and initialization (e.g. @Autowired for List types). But there is also a very useful feature, that might get overlooked and therefore let’s discuss about bean aliasing. Bean aliasing allows us to override already configured beans and to substitute them with a different object definition. This is most useful when the bean definitions are inherited from an external resource, which is… Read More
JPA Criteria API can generate unexpected SQL statements
Introduction In this article, we are going to learn why you should always check the SQL statements generated by JPA Criteria API queries when using Hibernate. Criteria API is very useful for dynamically building queries, but that’s the only use case where I’d use it. Whenever you have a UI with N filters that may arrive in any M combinations, it makes sense to have an API to construct queries dynamically since concatenating strings is always a path I’m running away from. The question is, are you aware of the SQL queries… Read More
JOOQ Facts: From JPA Annotations to JOOQ Table Mappings
JOOQ is a neat framework, and it addresses a long-time issue I’ve had with advanced dynamic filtered queries. While Hibernate and JPA come with a useful Criteria API, which I’ve been using for quite some time, there are understandable limits to what you can do with those. For instance, you cannot go beyond simple SQL operations (e.g JOINS, NESTED SLECTS, AGGREGATION) and do something like: window functions, user-defined functions or easy sequencing to name a few. JOOQ doesn’t feel like competing with Hibernate, but instead, I feel like it completes it. I’ve… Read More
Hibernate integration testing strategies
Introduction I like integration testing. As I explained in this article, it’s a good way to check what SQL queries are generated by Hibernate behind the scenes. But integration tests require a running database server, and this is the first choice you have to make. Using a production-like local database server for Integration Testing For a production environment, I always prefer using incremental DDL scripts, since I can always know what version is deployed on a given server, and which scripts required to be deployed. I’ve been relying on Flyway to manage… Read More
How to implement Equals and HashCode for JPA entities
Introduction Every Java object inherits the equals and hashCode methods, yet they are useful only for Value objects, being of no use for stateless behavior-oriented objects. While comparing references using the “==” operator is straightforward, for object equality things are a little bit more complicated.
How to fetch entities multiple levels deep with Hibernate
Introduction It’s quite common to retrieve a root entity along with its child associations on multiple levels. In our example, we need to load a Forest with its Trees and Branches and Leaves, and we will try to see have Hibernate behaves for three collection types: Sets, Indexed Lists, and Bags.
A beginner’s guide to Hibernate fetching strategies
Introduction When it comes to working with an ORM tool, everybody acknowledges the importance of database design and Entity-to-Table mapping. These aspects get a lot of attention, while things like fetching strategy might be simply put-off. In my opinion, the entity fetching strategy shouldn’t ever be separated from the entity mapping design, since it might affect the overall application performance unless properly designed. Before Hibernate and JPA got so popular, there was a great deal of effort put into designing each query, because you had to explicitly select all the joins you… Read More
