Welcome to the jOOQ Tuesdays series. In this series, we’ll publish an article on the third Tuesday every other month where we interview someone we find exciting in our industry from a jOOQ perspective. This includes people who work with SQL, Java, Open Source, and a variety of other related topics.
We have the pleasure of talking to Vlad Mihalcea in this third edition who will be telling us about the skills developers need to acquire when working with Java, SQL, and Hibernate.
Hi Vlad – You’re blog explodes with excellent posts about Hibernate. It looks like you love digging deep into the most popular persistence API in the market, right?
I really mean when saying that “teaching is my way of learning” and to master a certain technology, you have to go beyond the reference documentation. Hibernate has been around for 10 years now and there’s a plethora of projects built on top of it. The Hibernate Master Class focuses on some proven ORM design patterns, like concurrency control, caching and batching.
You’ve recently told me about your realisation of the lack of SQL insight in our industry. How did that come to be?
The Object-Relational mismatch is only the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to accessing data. The biggest problem we face in enterprise systems, is the Enterprise-Database developer mismatch.
A developer knows about the programming languages, design patterns and application architecturing, but database skills are always attributed to the Database Administrator role. This is a very dangerous assumption.
It’s as if we developed on Linux without ever wanting to learn how the operating system works, relying solely on the System Administrator knowledge. If you develop enterprise applications, you have no escape but learning how a database works. Reading the excellent “SQL Performance Explained” book, made me realize how little I knew about the inner-workings of relational database systems. This book is meant for developers and it’s a must-read for every enterprise developer professional.
What can we do to improve the situation for our industry? Is there a chance for a tighter integration of JPA and SQL? Or specifically, of Hibernate and jOOQ?
First, it’s the mindset that needs to change. We need to acknowledge that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all framework, and that applies to database access as well. When I write unit tests, I don’t limit myself to JUnit. I also use Mockito and Hamcrest, a testing stack being a better alternative.
JPA excels when writing data, because you can the INSERT/UPDATE statements are automatically updated, whenever the persistence model changes. The implicit and explicit locking allow us to protect against lost updates, especially in long conversation workflows.
But while abstracting the SQL write statements is a doable task, when it comes to reading data, nothing can beat native SQL. The most commonly-used RDBMS have implemented non-standard data access techniques (window functions, Common Table Expressions, PIVOT) and the SQL-92 JPA abstraction layer can only focus on common functionalities. That’s why native querying is unavoidable on almost any enterprise system.
jOOQ has done a very good job promoting SQL knowledge into the Java ecosystem. Java is ruling the enterprise software development and SQL skills have always been the Achilles heel of most enterprise development teams.
While you can fire native queries from JPA, there’s no support for dynamic native query building. jOOQ allows you to build type-safe dynamic native queries, strengthening your application against SQL-injection attacks. jOOQ can be integrated with JPA, as I already proven on my blog, and the JPA-jOOQ combo can provide a solid data access stack.
Tell us a little bit about your Hibernate Master Class, and your personal blogging strategy.
The Hibernate Master Class blog series is actually a book in the making. Because I work a full-time job, it’s difficult to commit to a fixed writing schedule, so I can only write as much as my spare times allows me.
Once all topics are covered, I’ll turn all this info into a book, that I’m going to self-publish, following the “SQL Performance Explained” example.
Where will you be in 5 years?
I enjoy both software architecture, as well as writing about it. I will continue on this journey and see where the wind will carry me.
| Reference: | jOOQ Tuesdays: Vlad Mihalcea Gives Deep Insight into SQL and Hibernate from our JCG partner Lukas Eder at the JAVA, SQL, AND JOOQ blog. |
