Thursday, September 20, 2012

Beware of using Hibernate 'increment' id generator

While reviewing one of the development projects using Hibernate as the ORM tool, I noticed that they were using the "increment" ID generation feature.

The way the implementation of this feature works is that it checks the highest value of the ID in the database and then increments it by one. But this approach fails miserable in a clusterned environment, because many threads might be writing to database concurrently and there is no locking.

It is best to stick to database specific features for auto-id generations, e.g. sequences in SQLServer 2012, Oracle 11g and identity columns in old versions of SQL Server.

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