Hi,

I'm new to Hibernate and a somewhat novice at databases too. What I am doing is developing an application where I will have multiple users and for most tables not much sharing.

To give some context, it is an application for the legal industry so I will have a table for a client(name, address, etc.), a table for case(case id, name, etc.). Now for all users of the application, they have their own clients, cases, etc.

Given that there is not much sharing of data, I thought I'd create a separate schema per user. How would this be done at runtime as the schema is specified in the hibernate.cfg.xml file or in the annotated class e.g. @Table (name="user", schema="myapp"). In fact is this even good design?

Thanks,
fb

Hmmm, this is very unusual. I think I would recommend not using a schema per user. Having so many schemas is going to be terrifically difficult to manage and would probably be a huge burden to maintain. Especially for someone new to the hibernate/database world.

I wouldn't really use the fact that there isn't much sharing of data to prompt you to use a separate schema per user. Tables often don't share information between rows. Given your description I think a simple database with a single schema with a table structure like:

User
User_Client
Client
Client_Case
Case

would be a good way to lay out your application.