Before writing this article, I talked to a group of software engineers who use Hibernate on a daily basis in their work. Some of them work for small companies (up to 20 developers on site) while others are employed in corporations known world-wide that employ over 100,000 IT professionals. This gave me an insight into how development with Hibernate is organized in different companies. There are several approaches to creating SQL scripts and Hibernate O/R Mapping classes.

Sooner or later there comes a moment when database performance is no longer satisfactory. One of the very first things you should turn to when that happens is database indexing. This article will give you a general overview on what indexes are without digging into too much detail. We’ll discuss additional database index topics in future articles. In general, a database index is a data structure used to improve queries execution time.

Some time ago, the Vertabelo Team participated in the PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2013. Some of the talks were really nice. One of them stuck in my head for quite a long time. It was Markus Winand’s lecture titled “Indexes: The neglected performance all-rounder.” Although I had had a solid background in databases, this 50 minutes long talk showed me that not everything concerning indexes was as clear to me as I had thought.

Suppose we design a database. We’ve created some tables, each one has a few columns. Now we need to choose columns to be primary keys (PK) and make references between tables. And here some inexperienced designers face the dilemma – should a primary key be natural or surrogate? There’s one and only one answer to that question: it depends. If anyone ever tried to convince you that you should have only natural keys or only surrogate keys, just smile :)

Today we are happy to announce that Vertabelo has a new feature we've been working on for some time – views. Now you can easily add them to the diagram, change their definition and other properties and have them generated in your SQL scripts. Quick overview of views Let's take a look at how simple it is to create a new view in our editor. Our goal is to make a view which joins three tables as follows: