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I am currently picking up Hibernate with the help of a shoppingcart-like-app that uses hibernate as its ORM tool.

However, in this application which has been in production for at least a few years, I see that a lot of of tables don't have the foreign key constraint.

I remember from my EJB2.0 days, this was rare. Foreign key constraint was rarely found to be missing.

I am really thinking it was intentional for them to not add foreign key constraint in some of the tables.


My question is: Is it generally cumbersome to deal with associations when it comes to hibernate? (association or composition). I also saw some questionable composition being done in their app. Is it just me? or do Hibernate users generally come across such leniently implemented databases?

I would say that could have been a personal choice. I have been using hibernate will well established databases and association handling has been perfect.

There are some things that you might expect from hibernate but they are missing. However, those are usually handled in one way or another. Still, it's way easier than doing jdbc.



Farzad-