Hello,

Can anyone point me to good resources, either online or books, that describe DB methodologies and that may also compliment my learning of hibernate?

I create my db from a hibernate mapping file at the moment so any theory that may help me to understand exactly what the available attributes do would be really helpful.

Thanks.

If you are at this stage (understanding tables and columns) any SQL database book would do, really :)

http://www.agiledata.org/, has some good info if you're asking about O/R mapping stuff.

Sorry for the delay in replying. The agiledata site does look very interesting; I think I'll pick up one of the books this week. Thanks!
I've learned some small bits from the forums but I think I'll have to start asking dumb questions :-P

If you're a fan of design patterns, then the book "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" by Martin Fowler (A.K.A. "the refactoring guy") might be of some help.

It's not about relational mapping per se, it's just a catalog of design patterns for enterprise applications (strucutred very similarly to GoF). However a serious chunk of those patterns, and by extension the book itself, is about different ways of doing database mapping.

I find well-written patterns an extremely good way to communicate the basic ideas behind a concept - and most of the data mapping patterns in the book relate directly to Hibernate (or any OR/Mapping tool for that matter).

It's also an extremely useful book completely apart from the data mapping portion.