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!

Why Spring Data JDBC?

The main persistence API for relational databases in the Java world is certainly JPA, which has its own Spring Data module. Why is there another one?

JPA does a lot of things in order to help the developer. Among other things, it tracks changes to entities. It does lazy loading for you. It lets you map a wide array of object constructs to an equally wide array of database designs.

This is great and makes a lot of things really easy. Just take a look at a basic JPA tutorial. But it often gets really confusing as to why JPA does a certain thing. Also, things that are really simple conceptually get rather difficult with JPA.

Spring Data JDBC aims to be much simpler conceptually, by embracing the following design decisions:

  • If you load an entity, SQL statements get run. Once this is done, you have a completely loaded entity. No lazy loading or caching is done.

  • If you save an entity, it gets saved. If you do not, it does not. There is no dirty tracking and no session.

  • There is a simple model of how to map entities to tables. It probably only works for rather simple cases. If you do not like that, you should code your own strategy. Spring Data JDBC offers only very limited support for customizing the strategy with annotations.