Thank you for sharing, Here is something you might find useful:
I don't know if you know about MySQL workbench? It will help you define your database schema. It gives a nice graphical layout, it's free... I'm using Ubuntu linux 10.04 and there was some issue, with it where I needed to download 5.2.22 RC then everything was perfect. It is important to understand foreign key relationships when working with any DB so read the documentation or it will cause issues later. Another thing, I use Netbeans... Your probably using Eclipse, in any case there are tools to automatically map your database tables for you. In Netbeans: You create a new web project, then you say you want to use the Hibernate framework. Then you right click your project: New->Hibernate Configuration Wizard (then follow the wizard) Then again right click the project: New->Hibernate Reverse Engineering Wizard (then follow the wizard) Then again right click the project: New->Hibernate Mapping Files and POJO from Database Wizard (this is the cool part, you get to select the tables and it will generate the XML and the POJO's for you) I know it generates xml... but everything will work and you can use it as a great starting place. (The same tools exist for Eclipse, never used them, they come out of the box with Netbeans).
