Hibernate - compound column?

[Clifford Adams]

I'm just starting out with hibernate, so hopefully this is a dumb question. Using SQL, I do things like this all the time because our DB seperates dates into 3 columns:

 select 
      digits(cdobmo) || '/' || digits(cdobda) || '/' || digits(cdobyr) as Birthday, 

how can I do something similar in hibernate and use it in a query?

another question: Should I bother learning HQL? I'm comfortable with SQL already.

Thanks.

[Paul Sturrock]

All you are doing with an ORM is mapping entities to POJOs. If you have an entity which defines a date as three fields, rather than using a DATE or TIMESTAMP (I can think of no good reason for doing this, but I'll assume you have one) then these values just get mapped to properties in a POJO. So rather than concatinating them in SQL, I'd include a derived property in your POJO which is these three properties concatinated.

Should I bother learning HQL? I'm comfortable with SQL already.

Its a good idea. Remember that SQL isn't truely portable. It might be called a standard, but its been variously implemented and extended on different DB platforms. The digits function you are using here for example isn't SQL, its Transact SQL (correct me if I'm wrong - I haven't checked).

One of the reasons for using an ORM is to free yourself up from DB dependencies - unfortunately if you rely on SQL rather then HQL you'll have to be very careful you don't introduce code which will generate SQLExceptions when you deploy it with a DB platform other than the one you developed on. And HQL is not exactly complicated anyway.

[Clifford Adams]

Thanks for the reply.

That's a good reason to larn HQL. Our backend is currently DB2 on AS400, but will be moving to Oracle in the next few years. When the change happens, all I would have to do is change my dialect setting, right?

FYI - I curse the designers of this DB every day. There is no good reason for the split dates, AFAIK.