Why is it necessary to annotate mapped Date fields @Temporal in javax.persistence?

Question

The format goes like this:

@Temporal(TemporalType.DATE)
@Column(name="CREATED_DATE")
private Date createdDate;

My question is: Why is it necessary to annotate mapped java.util.Date fields as @Temporal in javax.persistence? If the local variable is obviously declared as a Date and the column data type in the DB is also one of the date(time) or timestamp types, shouldn't it be easy to infer that we're dealing with a temporal bit of data without redundantly specifying it in multiple places?

Answer 1

From e.g. java.util.Date it's not obvious if one wants to map to DATE or TIMESTAMP database type. Only exception is java.sql.Date/Time.