For example, in Postgresql, we can create table like this (notice the ARRAY type of column "a"):
CREATE TABLE tt (a int[ ], b int);

Then we can insert data (including an int array) like this:
INSERT INTO tt (a, b) VALUES ('{1, 2, 3}', 50);

When selecting data, we can see:
test=# SELECT * from tt;
{1,2,3} | 50

Now the question is that can we map Java arrays, lists, etc. into a SINGLE database column of SQL type ARRAY? I did not find the information about this in the hibernate.org document.

The reason I want to do this is I have some fixed size arrays (e.g., a 4-element coordination vector), but I don't want to separate them into 4 columns, if possible.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Stanley

If you know how to do it using JDBC, writing a custom UserType for the Property should be trivial.

Thank you very much for your help! This really provides much flexibility!