Spring Boot + JPA : Column name annotation ignored

Question

For Hibernate 5, I solved this issue by adding the following lines in my application.properties file:

spring.jpa.hibernate.naming.implicit-strategy=org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.ImplicitNamingStrategyLegacyJpaImpl
spring.jpa.hibernate.naming.physical-strategy=org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.PhysicalNamingStrategyStandardImpl

By default Spring uses org.springframework.boot.orm.jpa.SpringNamingStrategy to generate table names. This is a very thin extension of org.hibernate.cfg.ImprovedNamingStrategy. The tableName method in that class is passed a source String value but it is unaware if it comes from a @Column.name attribute or if it has been implicitly generated from the field name.

The ImprovedNamingStrategy will convert CamelCase to SNAKE_CASE where as the EJB3NamingStrategy just uses the table name unchanged.

If you don't want to change the naming strategy you could always just specify your column name in lowercase:

@Column(name="testname")

It seems that

@Column(name="..")

is completely ignored unless there is

spring.jpa.hibernate.naming_strategy=org.hibernate.cfg.EJB3NamingStrategy

specified, so to me this is a bug.

I spent a few hours trying to figure out why @Column(name="..") was ignored.

The default strategy for @Column(name="TestName") will be test_name, this is correct behavior!

If you have a column named TestName in your database you should change Column annotation to @Column(name="testname").

This works because database does not care if you name your column TestName or testname (column names are case insensitive!!).

But beware, the same does not apply for database name and table names, that are case sensitive on Unix systems but case in sensitive on Windows systems (the fact that probably kept a lot of people awake at night, working on windows but deploying on linux :))

The only solution that worked for me was the one posted by teteArg above. I'm on Spring Boot 1.4.2 w/Hibernate 5. Namely

spring.jpa.hibernate.naming.implicit-strategy=org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.ImplicitNamingStrategyLegacyJpaImpl
spring.jpa.hibernate.naming.physical-strategy=org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.PhysicalNamingStrategyStandardImpl

For additional insight I'm posting the call trace so that its clear what calls Spring is making into Hibernate to setup the naming strategy.

      at org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.PhysicalNamingStrategyStandardImpl.toPhysicalColumnName(PhysicalNamingStrategyStandardImpl.java:46)
  at org.hibernate.cfg.Ejb3Column.redefineColumnName(Ejb3Column.java:309)
  at org.hibernate.cfg.Ejb3Column.initMappingColumn(Ejb3Column.java:234)
  at org.hibernate.cfg.Ejb3Column.bind(Ejb3Column.java:206)
  at org.hibernate.cfg.Ejb3DiscriminatorColumn.buildDiscriminatorColumn(Ejb3DiscriminatorColumn.java:82)
  at org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationBinder.processSingleTableDiscriminatorProperties(AnnotationBinder.java:797)
  at org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationBinder.bindClass(AnnotationBinder.java:561)
  at org.hibernate.boot.model.source.internal.annotations.AnnotationMetadataSourceProcessorImpl.processEntityHierarchies(AnnotationMetadataSourceProcessorImpl.java:245)
  at org.hibernate.boot.model.process.spi.MetadataBuildingProcess$1.processEntityHierarchies(MetadataBuildingProcess.java:222)
  at org.hibernate.boot.model.process.spi.MetadataBuildingProcess.complete(MetadataBuildingProcess.java:265)
  at org.hibernate.jpa.boot.internal.EntityManagerFactoryBuilderImpl.metadata(EntityManagerFactoryBuilderImpl.java:847)
  at org.hibernate.jpa.boot.internal.EntityManagerFactoryBuilderImpl.build(EntityManagerFactoryBuilderImpl.java:874)
  at org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.SpringHibernateJpaPersistenceProvider.createContainerEntityManagerFactory(SpringHibernateJpaPersistenceProvider.java:60)
  at org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean.createNativeEntityManagerFactory(LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean.java:353)
  at org.springframework.orm.jpa.AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean.buildNativeEntityManagerFactory(AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean.java:373)
  at org.springframework.orm.jpa.AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean.afterPropertiesSet(AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean.java:362)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.invokeInitMethods(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1642)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.initializeBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1579)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:553)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.createBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:482)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory$1.getObject(AbstractBeanFactory.java:306)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.getSingleton(DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.java:230)
  - locked <0x1687> (a java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.doGetBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:302)
  at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:197)
  at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.getBean(AbstractApplicationContext.java:1081)
  at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.finishBeanFactoryInitialization(AbstractApplicationContext.java:856)
  at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:542)
  - locked <0x1688> (a java.lang.Object)
  at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.refresh(SpringApplication.java:761)
  at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.refreshContext(SpringApplication.java:371)
  at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:315)
  at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:1186)
  at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:1175)