Hello Everyone,

I learned Hibernate about 2 days ago, from a short tutorial.

Here's some short intro about the database set-up:

I'm creating a new database from scratch. The database is being populated with automated feeds.

Each feed is stored in it's corresponding table in MySQL.

The notation for some feeds indicates the columns that need to be considered as primary key(s).

I was reading somewhere that having composite primary keys in Hibernate is suitable only for legacy databases and that , it's not a good idea to have composite keys.

I'm trying to decide whether to add an additional column to all these tables that indicates the primary key?

Or should I create a Hibernate composite key?

If a composite key is supposed to uniquely identify records in a table, then having a single auto generated primary key may not serve the purpose in my opinion.

Please advice what approach should be taken in this case...

I appreciate your input
Hibernate version: 3.3

Hi,

the question is, if you have many realtions between the tables and what you want to achieve with your Hibernate application.
If there exists many associations and you want to use inheritance and have a really complex datamodel, I'd use single values primary keys.

However, if there are no associations between the tables, composite primary keys are just fine.

And if you do not know all the requirements of your Hibernate application by now I would also go for single valued primary keys.

Regards,
Joern