This is something that has been bothering me for a long time. HHH-6328[1] is a specific example. Basically we are very inconsistent in how we attempt to match up table and column names, especially when there are naming strategies involved. We see this with secondary tables, @org.hibernate.annotations.Table, etc.
Consider the following mapping: @Entity @Table( name="`USER`" ) class User { ... } The question is how they should refer to this table in other annotations such as @Column or @org.hibernate.annotations.Table e.g. And part of this gets to whether the implicit or physical naming strategies should have any part in the matching process. I think I am not a fan of the mapping having to change just because they plug in a new naming strategy. So ideally I'd prefer that the naming strategies not take part in this process. I guess I just wanted to start a discussion about how to best deal with this. One option is that they need to match exactly (maybe with some simple handling of quoted versus case-insensitive, similar to Identifier#equals leveraging Identifier#getCanonicalName), e.g.: @Entity @Table( name="`USER`" ) @org.hibernate.annotations.Table( appliesTo="`USER`", ... ) class User { ... } I guess the first question here is whether we want to support referring to implicit table names in other annotations at all. JPA for the most part discourages this; in order for a table name to be referenced in other annotations it should be named explicitly. Another option is to leverage the "logical name" (implicit or explicit) and to apply a Identifier#equals-like check for matching. This would however lead to what I mentioned above wrt naming strategies playing a part in the matching. Consider we base matching on the logical name and that we have: @Entity @org.hibernate.annotations.Table( appliesTo="user", ... ) class User { ... } So this *might work* depending on the configured naming strategies. But it is also therefore highly dependent upon the naming strategies and changing the naming strategy could conceivably cause the match to no longer find the table. A sort of hybrid approach between those 2 would be to use a specific "matchable name determination strategy" (think JPA implicit naming rules). At the very least, as HHH-6328 shows again, we really ought to stay away from simple String comparisons. Even a simple move to using Identifier for the comparisons would help in that specific area. [1] https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-6328 _______________________________________________ hibernate-dev mailing list hibernate-dev@lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev