So I ran into a fun little issue the other day while working with MySQL and Hibernate.
Hibernate provides optimistic locking via the Version function. This can either be a numeric field or a timestamp. I use Hibernate Annotations, so for me it simply involves placing the following annotation inside my entity.
private Date dateModified;
@Version
private Date getDateModified() {
return dateModified;
}
private void setDateModified(Date dateModified) {
this.dateModified = dateModified;
}This worked great for me, and provided both an optimistic lock as well as a dateModified field I could use to show the last time the entity was updated. I should say that this worked great during development while I was using hypersonic as my database. When I deployed to a lab server for testing against our MySQL database I started to run into some OptimisticLockExceptions
After doing some digging around I found out that MySQL doesn’t store date/time with millisecond precision. This is a well known feature request / bug and it doesn’t appear that it will be fixed anytime soon. So I was forced to refactor my code so that the "version" was a int and still maintain a dateModified field since the user interface had made use of it in various places.
Thankfully Hibernate provides Call Back annotations which allow me to trigger an update of the dateModified when a Persist or Update is called. I also used this logic to automatically set the dateCreated field on entities when needed.
I also added an @Deprecated to the setters for dateCreated and dateModified to discourage others from setting those fields manually.
Here is what the final code looks like.
private int version;
private Date dateCreated;
private Date dateModified;
@NotNull
public Date getDateCreated() {
return dateCreated;
}
@Deprecated
public void setDateCreated(Date dateCreated) {
this.dateCreated = dateCreated;
}
@PrePersist
public void updateDateCreated() {
dateCreated = new Date();
dateModified = dateCreated;
}
@NotNull
public Date getDateModified() {
return dateModified;
}
@Deprecated
public void setDateModified(Date dateModified) {
this.dateModified = dateModified;
}
@PreUpdate
public void updateDateModified() {
dateModified = new Date();
}Update!
It looks like mysql has this on their roadmap and outlines their plans with a fairly extensive worklog. However this is slated for MySQL 6.0 or 7.0 and thus will be a few years out. Maybe it’s time to checkout what PostgreSQL is all about.
