How To Generate Sequences Of Identifiers Via Hibernate pooled Algorithm

Note: Rely on pooled-lo or pooled especially if, beside your application, external systems needs to insert rows in your tables. Don't rely on hi/lo since, in such cases, it may cause errors resulted from generating duplicated identifiers.

Description: This is a Spring Boot example of using the pooled algorithm. The pooled is an optimization of hi/lo. This algorithm fetched from the database the current sequence value as the top boundary identifier (the current sequence value is computed as the previous sequence value + increment_size). This way, the application will use in-memory identifiers generated between the previous top boundary exclusive (aka, lowest boundary) and the current top boundary inclusive.

Key points:

• use the SEQUENCE generator type (e.g., in PostgreSQL)
• configure the pooled algorithm as in Author.java entity
• insert a few records via pooled
• insert a few records natively (this acts as an external system that relies on NEXTVAL('hilo_sequence') and is not aware of pooled presence and/or behavior)

Conclusion: In contrast to the classical hi/lo algorithm, the Hibernate pooled algorithm doesn't cause issues to external systems that wants to interact with our tables. In other words, external systems can concurrently insert rows in the tables relying on pooled algorithm. Nevertheless, old versions of Hibernate can raise exceptions caused by INSERT statements triggered by external systems that uses the lowest boundary as identifier. This is a good reason to update to Hibernate latest versions (e.g., Hibernate 5.x), which have fixed this issue.

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