In several of the projects we have worked on, customers have asked us to log more user actions in the database. They want to know all of the actions the users perform in the application, but capturing and recording all human interactions can be challenging. We had to log all modifications of data performed via the system. This article describes some of the pitfalls we encountered and the approaches that we used to overcome them.

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.