What is the "owning side" in an ORM mapping?

Question

Why is the notion of a owning side necessary:

The idea of a owning side of a bidirectional relation comes from the fact that in relational databases there are no bidirectional relations like in the case of objects. In databases we only have unidirectional relations - foreign keys.

What is the reason for the name 'owning side'?

The owning side of the relation tracked by Hibernate is the side of the relation that owns the foreign key in the database.

What is the problem that the notion of owning side solves?

Take an example of two entities mapped without declaring a owning side:

@Entity
@Table(name="PERSONS")
public class Person {
    @OneToMany
    private List<IdDocument>  idDocuments;
}

@Entity
@Table(name="ID_DOCUMENTS")
public class IdDocument {
    @ManyToOne
    private Person person;
}

From a OO point of view this mapping defines not one bi-directional relation, but two separate uni-directional relations.

The mapping would create not only tables PERSONS and ID_DOCUMENTS, but would also create a third association table PERSONS_ID_DOCUMENTS:

CREATE TABLE PERSONS_ID_DOCUMENTS
(
  persons_id bigint NOT NULL,
  id_documents_id bigint NOT NULL,
  CONSTRAINT fk_persons FOREIGN KEY (persons_id) REFERENCES persons (id),
  CONSTRAINT fk_docs FOREIGN KEY (id_documents_id) REFERENCES id_documents (id),
  CONSTRAINT pk UNIQUE (id_documents_id)
)

Notice the primary key pk on ID_DOCUMENTS only. In this case Hibernate tracks both sides of the relation independently: If you add a document to relation Person.idDocuments, it inserts a record in the association table PERSON_ID_DOCUMENTS.

On the other hand, if we call idDocument.setPerson(person), we change the foreign key person_id on table ID_DOCUMENTS. Hibernate is creating two unidirectional (foreign key) relations on the database, to implement one bidirectional object relation.

How the notion of owning side solves the problem:

Many times what we want is only a foreign key on table ID_DOCUMENTS towards PERSONSand not the extra association table.

To solve this we need to configure Hibernate to stop tracking the modifications on relation Person.idDocuments. Hibernate should only track the other side of the relation IdDocument.person, and to do so we add mappedBy:

@OneToMany(mappedBy="person")
private List<IdDocument>  idDocuments;

What does it mean mappedBy ?

This means something like: "modifications on this side of the relation are already Mapped By the other side of the relation IdDocument.person, so no need to track it here separately in an extra table."

Are there any GOTCHAs, consequences?

Using mappedBy, If we only call person.getDocuments().add(document), the foreign key in ID_DOCUMENTS will NOT be linked to the new document, because this is not the owning /tracked side of the relation!

To link the document to the new person, you need to explicitly call document.setPerson(person), because that is the owning side of the relation.

When using mappedBy, it is the responsibility of the developer to know what is the owning side, and update the correct side of the relation in order to trigger the persistence of the new relation in the database.

You can imagine that the owning side is the entity that has the reference to the other one. In your excerpt, you have an one-to-one relationship. Since it's a symmetric relation, you'll end up having that if object A is in relation with object B then also the vice-versa is true.

This means that saving into object A a reference to object B and saving in object B a reference to object A will be redundant: that's why you choose which object "owns" the other having the reference to it.

When you have got an one-to-many relationship, the objects related to the "many" part will be the owning side, otherwise you would have to store many references from a single object to a multitude. To avoid that, every object in the second class will have a pointer to the single one they refer to (so they are the owning side).

For a many-to-many relationship, since you will need a separate mapping table anyway there won't be any owning side.

In conclusion the owning side is the entity that has the reference to the other.