The jOOQ User Manual Coming from JPA Database first

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Database first

Applies to ✅ Open Source Edition   ✅ Express Edition   ✅ Professional Edition   ✅ Enterprise Edition

In principle, JPA is agnostic of an entity model first or DDL first / database first approach. In principle, you can:

• Write DDL (e.g. migrate it with Flyway or Liquibase), then re-generate your entity code.
• Write entities, then re-generate your database or derive DDL increments from your git history, etc.
• Manually maintain both in parallel.

jOOQ is more opinionated here. It assumes your database already exists, outside of jOOQ. It does not assume your database follows any rules imposed by jOOQ regarding the design. For example, when using jOOQ, it's completely irrelevant:

• If you're using surrogate keys or natural keys
• If your keys have single columns or multiple columns
• If your tables even have keys, or if they're not in the first normal form
• If your tables are even tables, or if they're views, table valued functions, etc

Not just that jOOQ doesn't care about your database model, it also doesn't care about your client side data representation (e.g. the DTOs). I.e. it doesn't care:

• If your DTO classes and attributes are public or private
• If your DTOs are immutable or mutable
• If your DTOs implement equals() or hashCode() in any way
• If your DTOs have a meaningful identity, or are just value based classes (or soon even actual value types!)

There are no best practices from a jOOQ perspective. jOOQ has seen everything, and jOOQ won't judge you. jOOQ knows, that if your tables are not even in the first normal form, you'll have enough problems already, so you don't also need a problem with jOOQ.

But

But, again, jOOQ expects you to have a database that already exists. Yes, you can even use jOOQ for your DDL, but the point here is that you write DDL first, then your jOOQ queries later, ideally using source code generation.

Client applications come and go. They used to be written in Delphi. Then PHP. Then Java. Now Kotlin. Soon TypeScript/Rust/Go/Whatever? But your database stays. It will survive your client application, and as such, jOOQ understands that your database must come first.

Obviously, there exist other ways to think about business logic and databases. But jOOQ was designed for the database first model.

The jOOQ User Manual Coming from JPA Database first

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