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.

What is Gradle? Gradle is an open source build automation system. It can automate the building, testing, publishing, deployment and more of software packages or other types of projects such as generated static websites, generated documentation or indeed anything else. Learn more about what makes Gradle a compelling choice for build automation. One of the exciting moments in a programmer’s life is to leave legacy code behind and have fun with some new, fresh and cool tools.

Sorry for that tabloid title, but I couldn’t resist. I’m going to show you how to view the database design of other people’s systems. It will work for legacy systems as well. Of course, you may call show tables and describe table in the database console but that’s a very rudimentary way to examine the structure. You’ll miss a bird’s eye view of the design which is crucial to understanding a system as a whole.