Workaround for java hibernate to update row in mySQL tables with reserved words as column names

Question

I need to connect to a legacy database with tables that have column names such as 'like'. Most logical way to fix this was to rename the columns, but the db admin does not want to perform any changes to the existing db.

Is there a way to workaround this to force hibernate to add backtick?

Answer 1

There are various workarounds, depending on the context:

• For XML mapping files, enclose the keyword with quotes¹.

• For Hibernate annotations, enclose the keyword with quotes².

• You can tell Hibernate to quote all SQL identifiers with:

  hibernate.globally_quoted_identifiers=true
  

  in the Hibernate settings file.

• In HQL, you can escape aliases via a custom transformer; see https://stackoverflow.com/a/5754720/139985 for an example.

References:

• http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/5.2/userguide/html_single/Hibernate_User_Guide.html#mapping-quoted-identifiers
• https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/5.2/userguide/html_single/appendices/Configurations.html
• https://www.mkyong.com/hibernate/how-to-use-database-reserved-keyword-in-hibernate/
• How to escape reserved words in Hibernate's HQL

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^{1 - Different sources say to use database-specific quotes or backticks which Hibernate supposedly knows how to translate. I am not in a position to check this. Both approaches could work.}

^{2 - Apparently double quotes (escaped) and square brackets can be used.}