In Relation To

The first edition of Hibernate in Action has spread quite successfully. On training or consulting somewhere on-site I often see people with a copy on their desk. And it has proven to be invaluable to me (and others at JBoss) bringing a few copies along every-time. There is simply no better additional training material than a professionally edited full-length book. The only downside is that it is only covering Hibernate 2.x.

Yesterday, another vendor marketing statement was posted on TSS. I usually ignore these, but when it is about data management, I just have to reply. What is always surprising to me is how little we Java developers still know about data management. Here is a statement made by Maxim Kramarenko in the discussion thread:

Hibernate3 is now ready for a public test, go get it! It has all (well almost all) features we'll ever need for object/relational mapping, and if it doesn't have it, it's easy to subclass, extend, and implement.

I just cleaned up some of my files and found this snapshot in one of my folders. I made it two weeks ago, as I finally had time to install Oracle 10g. I remember how I was shaking my head in desperation as I realized what they had done. Let me explain.

I finally got the comments from our Hibernate in Action reviewers back, so it's time to give everyone an update on the current state. First, thanks to all of you guys for your feedback. We really appreciate the many hours you spent reading and commenting on the book. As one of you said: A good book is only possible with excellent reviewers.

I've seen three or four ORM tool comparisons in the last three weeks; on some weblogs, on our forum and I've even been part in several decisions.

Recently, I helped one of our customers migrating a legacy database to Hibernate; one of the more interesting topics was versioning and audit logging. Actually, in the last couple of months, the subject of historical data came up several times. No matter if it was a legacy SQL schema or a migration from a broken object-oriented database, everyone had their own way to log data changes.

This is a reply on the Hibernate forum, read the full thread for the context.

About two years ago, a co-worker asked me innocently: What are scalar types anyway?