ID Generator
A lot of us (until recently myself included) tend to use Sequence generators to generate PKs. These are well known to anybody who used Oracle or any other RDBMS. Sequences, however tend to have a number of issues:
- They require an extra database object for each ID. Those need to be part of DDL, and are yet another moving part when deploying code changes. How many of us deployed new code, only to find out we forgot to create corresponding sequences.
- If you ever plan on exposing your objects outside (like datawarehouse for example) the sequences need to be staggered across all your partitions and regions. This is a manual, error prone process.
Instead consider using a UUID generator with a time prefix to create a 29 char unique id. You will need to create a custom UUID generator:
import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
import java.util.UUID;
import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64;
import org.hibernate.engine.SessionImplementor;
import org.hibernate.id.IdentifierGenerator;
import org.joda.time.DateTime;
import org.joda.time.DateTimeZone;
import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormat;
/**
* Generates a UUID used for a hibernate ID.
*/
public class UUIDGenerator implements IdentifierGenerator {
/**
* Returns a Base64-encoded UUID with a time prefix. The Base64 encoding is
* there to shorten the length of the ID (without losing any information in
* the process).
*/
@Override
public String generate(SessionImplementor session, Object object) {
// Create a new byte buffer packed with the 128-bits from a randomly
// generated UUID
UUID uuid = java.util.UUID.randomUUID();
ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.allocate(16)
.putLong(uuid.getMostSignificantBits()) // First 8 bytes
.putLong(uuid.getLeastSignificantBits()); // Last 8 bytes
// Base-64 encode the UUID, remove the trailing '='
String base64 = new String(Base64.encodeBase64(bb.array())).substring(0, 22);
// Prepend date + hour to the application to optimize block caching on
// Oracle side
// See Grant McAlister's POA presentation for the reasons behind that
String prefix = new DateTime(DateTimeZone.UTC).toString(DateTimeFormat.forPattern("yyyyDDD"));
// Done
return prefix + base64;
}
}
Next, all you need is to declare this UUID generator on your PKs:
@Entity
@Table(name = "MY_ENTITY")
@org.hibernate.annotations.GenericGenerator(name = "uuid-generator", strategy = "UUIDGenerator")
public class Entity {
@Id
@Column(name = "ID", length = 29)
@GeneratedValue(generator = "uuid-generator")
private String id;
}
(RECOMMENDED ) See Grant McAlister's January 2010 PoA GEMs talk on UUIDs to learn about how to prefix GUIDs/UUIDs with time information to drastically minimize impact on your databases during writes for high insert rate applications.
Other topics:
A Quick Guide : http://betterexplained.com/articles/the-quick-guide-to-guids/