This version is still in development and is not considered stable yet. For the latest stable version, please use Spring Data Relational 3.3.5!

Schema Creation

When working with SQL databases, the schema is an essential part. Spring Data JDBC supports a wide range of schema options yet when starting with a domain model it can be challenging to come up with an initial domain model. To assist you with a code-first approach, Spring Data JDBC ships with an integration to create database change sets using Liquibase.

Consider the following domain entity:

@Table
class Person {
  @Id long id;
  String firstName;
  String lastName;
  LocalDate birthday;
  boolean active;
}

Rendering the initial ChangeSet through the following code:

RelationalMappingContext context = … // The context contains the Person entity, ideally initialized through initialEntitySet
LiquibaseChangeSetWriter writer = new LiquibaseChangeSetWriter(context);

writer.writeChangeSet(new FileSystemResource(new File(…)));

yields the following change log:

databaseChangeLog:
- changeSet:
    id: '1685969572426'
    author: Spring Data Relational
    objectQuotingStrategy: LEGACY
    changes:
    - createTable:
        columns:
        - column:
            autoIncrement: true
            constraints:
              nullable: false
              primaryKey: true
            name: id
            type: BIGINT
        - column:
            constraints:
              nullable: true
            name: first_name
            type: VARCHAR(255 BYTE)
        - column:
            constraints:
              nullable: true
            name: last_name
            type: VARCHAR(255 BYTE)
        - column:
            constraints:
              nullable: true
            name: birthday
            type: DATE
        - column:
            constraints:
              nullable: false
            name: active
            type: TINYINT
        tableName: person

Column types are computed from an object implementing the SqlTypeMapping strategy interface. Nullability is inferred from the type and set to false if a property type use primitive Java types.

Schema support can assist you throughout the application development lifecycle. In differential mode, you provide an existing Liquibase Database to the schema writer instance and the schema writer compares existing tables to mapped entities and derives from the difference which tables and columns to create/to drop. By default, no tables and no columns are dropped unless you configure dropTableFilter and dropColumnFilter. Both filter predicate provide the table name respective column name so your code can computer which tables and columns can be dropped.

writer.setDropTableFilter(tableName -> …);
writer.setDropColumnFilter((tableName, columnName) -> …);

Schema support can only identify additions and removals in the sense of removing tables/columns that are not mapped or adding columns that do not exist in the database. Columns cannot be renamed nor data cannot be migrated because entity mapping does not provide details of how the schema has evolved.